A RITUAL FOR FACING THE DARKNESS

With KATARSIS, award-winning director Anja Behrens creates a grand and sensory theatrical experience about humanity’s eternal longing to find meaning in a world marked by uncertainty and collapse.

We live in a time, where grand narratives that once gave us direction are dissolving. Alliances are faltering, the future seems uncertain, and powerlessness has become a fundamental feeling. In our search for meaning, we look to the stars, turn to tarot and search for signs in the world around us. We turn towards rituals, the magical and the incomprehensible.

In KATARSIS, we call upon the Völva’s Prophecy – the ancient Norse seeress who holds the memories of what has been forgotten. The performance explores whether wisdom can be found in memory – in the stories, rituals and experiences that generations before us have used to make sense of a changing world.

On stage, Signe Egholm Olsen and Patrick Baurichter enter into a poetic and sensory ritual. Drawing on Norse mythology, cultural history and spiritual experiences, the performance does not seek answers, but hope and new possibilities. Transformation require for us to dare to move into the unknown.

KATARSIS is a fusion of an ancient ceremony and a poetic universe of electronic sound, living bodies, hypnosis, earth, water, light, darkness and, not least, a distinctly mythological resonance. In Christian Albrechtsen’s scenography, reality is shifted until the boundaries between the concrete and the mystical dissolve.

Here, we discover that hope may not be something we find, but something we need to practise.

KATARSIS is based on the Norse Eddic poem Völuspá (The Völva’s Prophecy) – translated by Rolf Stavnem – created with help from author, speaker and initiated völva Andrea Hejlskov, who has 25 years of experience with witchcraft.

PLEASE NOTE: The performance is in Danish

Photo: Jasko Bobar