CPH Stage Festival 2024

The 12th annual edition of CPH Stage Festival has come to a close. The cultural highlight that transforms the city into a dynamic hub of theatrical creativity and innovation had originally started in 2013 as a bottom up initiative in collaboration between four smaller Copenhagen venues (GROB/Blaagaard, Husets Teater, Teater V and Sort/Hvid). Its steady growth over the years has meant that this year’s festival – taking place between 29th May and 8th June – has featured over 100 distinct events across the genres of drama, music, dance, street performance, circus, opera, audio walks, live art, immersive performance and various combinations of these.

This year’s programming displayed a particular interest in global perspectives, including performances from as far afield as Mumbai and the Dominican Republic, but the decolonial angle did not bypass Denmark’s own problematic colonial history either. Other specific themes highlighted by the repertoire included (anti)-heroism, activism, crisis and youth loneliness in the digital age.

The festival website did pick out their top recommendations for uninitiated punters, as well as potential thematic areas of focus. Additionally a selection of the programme accessible to English speakers was made available as an international showcase during the opening weekend of the festival. Having not been available to attend on that occasion, I personally counted 18 different shows I could choose from for the rest of the festival that did not present a language barrier.

The first I’d like to mention is the work of Copenhagen-based Fix+Foxy, who are by now something of a regular fixture of CPH Stage. International audiences may be aware of their recent hit Dark Noon which took the Edinburgh Fringe 2023 by storm and is currently touring the United States.

Fix+Foxy had two performances accessible in English in this year’s CPH Stage: an older sci-fi audio piece Stalker, based on Tarkovsky’s film and available for free, and a brand-new premiere of Berries of Wrath at Teater Republique, created in collaboration with Moroccan strawberry pickers from the south of Spain plus a selection of Danish teenagers. While you get quite a bit of freedom in how you experience the performance of Stalker – where, with whom, and to what exact extent of personal investment when it comes to the question of ‘what you want, what you really, really want’ – things are a bit different in relation to Berries of Wrath.

Paraphrasing the famous 1939 title by John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath which also deals with the subject of social injustice and exploitation of migrant workers, director Tue Biering’s show cleverly reframes an aspect of the contemporary reality that frequently goes unseen. The fact that the performance takes place in Arabic, Spanish and on one occasion Romanian, with English or Danish subtitles, places the audience in a condition that the Moroccan migrant workers themselves grapple with as part of their daily reality in the strawberry fields of southern Spain. The four Danish teenagers taking part in each performance do not speak. They merely re-enact the lives we hear about while they are coached in meticulous detail on how to work and live as ‘the other’. All along a giant turtle – a migrant worker itself? – sits downstage center in a snug glass cage, decorated with an EU flag, like the metaphorical ‘elephant in the room’.

‘The sight of strawberries makes me sick’ confides Mustapha, a young Moroccan migrant worker, temporarily starring in this show as an actor and storyteller. He even at one point curates a live phone in with a friend of his at work in the fields. These specific conceptual choices make up the beauty of Tue Biering’s show. But amid all this, ethical questions arise which are mostly left to the audience to deal with or feel uncomfortable about on their own. It is a bittersweet experience, for sure – one that confronts the North/Western European audience with their naivety, privilege and consumer behavior. But what actually happens next? Will we stop buying imported groceries? Will this show change anything? Does theater offer any therapy or is it yet another form of exploitative labor? How much were the workers paid to be in this show? And what about the teenagers? How were they selected and trained? And after becoming actors, do they now all have to return to their pre-artistic life? Does it constitute animal cruelty to keep a turtle confined under the stage lights every day? And what is worse: animal cruelty or neoliberal capitalism?

Questioning oneself is indeed the point, and if you only saw this show, it would have been enough to keep you going for the entire ten days and more (as it has done for me), but it was only one in a veritable sea of much talked about highlights. I therefore selected two others for the sake of balance, which also help to illustrate the range.

Don’t Pay Your Debts, created and performed by activist performance-makers Andreas Liebmann and Boaz Barkan took place in the community center of Tårnby, a remote and fairly underserved district of Copenhagen. Swiss-born Liebmann is actually the founder of Tårnby Park Studios where he curates a fascinating program of participatory and interdisciplinary activities outside of the confines of CPH Stage. This is not his first collaboration with Israeli-born dancer Boaz Barkan, but it is one in which the two deliver a remarkably compatible duet that also fuses poetry, economics, clowning and live art.

The audience are seated within a circle of comfortable armchairs, in a bright and airy room equipped with just enough state-of-the-art lighting and sound equipment to deliver a polished effect. The armchairs are also equipped with pens and notebooks, partially filled with the scribbles of some previous audience members, and now bequeathed to us as a sort of inheritance from our ancestors. The piece breaks the conventional boundaries of theater by involving the audience in a low focus writing workshop on the poetry of economics, which is interspersed with episodes of reflection, posing, and interaction between Liebmann and Barkan dressed in leotards and nylon stocking balaclavas. Don’t Pay Your Debts challenges participants to reflect on their relationship with money, debt, globalization and privilege, inviting a sense of community and shared exploration, even if on a temporary basis. If the effect of this work on the audience is not entirely accessible to a one-off visitor, it at least feels reassuring that someone is insisting on this kind of provocation in the outskirts of a big city just as much as they might in a cutting edge inner city gallery.

Moving in the opposite direction – that is, from the margins to the very center – is the performance of Nordting, programmed at the Royal Danish Playhouse on 4th and 5th June. June 5th is a public holiday celebrating the constitution day in Denmark, and this year is a 175th anniversary of the Constitution Act, so this was an opportune moment for the Danes to reflect on their democracy with the help of an event that takes the form of a ‘mobile people’s assembly’. Conceived and compared by Norwegian artist and composer Amund Sjølie Sveen, Nordting has toured and canvassed the opinions of the great North for over ten years now, as carefully documented by a fun PowerPoint presentation. Sveen holds the stage together with several other performers gathered from various often neglected corners of the world. This includes chiefly the Sami actress and singer Marte Fjellheim Sarre and Norwegian composer Erik Stifjell, but also Faroese singer and songwriter Guðrið Hansdóttir, Greenland’s pop star Tûtu, the Icelandic women’s choir Dóttir, Faroese activist Katrin Sigurspálsdóttir Kampban and Danish-based writer and dramaturg from Greenland Siri Paulsen. The set of music numbers and solo performances is interspersed with a string of audience polls on specific questions and each of the two nights focused on the two former Danish colonies, without a constitution of their own – the Faroe Islands and Greenland, or Kalaallit Nunaat, as we indeed all learned and voted to call it from 5th June onwards. Taking both participatory theater and populism to a next and possibly quite complicated level, this thought-provoking piece of live performance invites audiences to consider issues of autonomy, identity, and historical justice, which makes it a timely and certainly memorable addition to CPH Stage’s ambitious line up for this year. Just how it will be topped next year – it remains to be seen!