Please note: How to Read Water #4 is a long durational performance. The doors open at 12:00 and the performance starts at 13:00 and will continue until 16:00. You can come and go as you please during the performance, which is a part of Meta.Morf 2022 – Ecophilia! Participating artists: Anna Thu Schmidt, Thea Ellingsen Grant, Hanne Dahl Geving and Mina Paasche.
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I’d not be surprised if there were as many stories about the sea as there are grains of sand washed up on its many shores. Those stories have come to change in recent years however. Not so long ago, the sea was considered too large to ever be claimed by any nation, now it has been mapped, measured and divided, but it’s also threatening to swallow up whole countries and completely upend the way we live our lives. There is no escaping that the sea, and water, will claim even more space in future stories.

The performance “How to Read Water #4” seeks to explore our multifaceted relationship to the different forms of water that surrounds us, especially the ocean. Through interconnected installations, dance, sound and video pieces the participating artists Anna Thu Schmidt, Thea Ellingsen Grant, Hanne Dahl Geving and Mina Paasche will create a room for reflection. Inspired by the research on how Blue Spaces – such as oceans and other bodies of water – affect us humans, the artists will move as one, much like their subject.

Water has been shown to improve our mood and to have beneficial effects on urban areas and its inhabitants. Our bodies clearly respond to it, when we see it, smell it, touch it, dream of it. Water resonates in us, we are connected by its ebbs and flows. And as a whole we’re still drawn to it like those who wrote of it some thousands of years ago, like Narcissus we seek to reflect ourselves, our time and our way of life in it. This is how to read water.

Special thanks to the co-producer DansIT, Meta.Morf, TEKS, Kulturrådet, Norske Kunstforeninger, Sparebank 1 SMN and Trondheim Kommune!

Photo by Juliane Schütz