Dagmar Vestergaard Friis

Works with Live Art Danmark
2015 Performer in “Carnation & Quartz”, by Essi Kausalainen, Bästa Biennal, Kristianstad and Ystad, Sweden
2016 Performance with Odun Orimolade, COLAB Copenhagen
2017 Lead Performer in “The Attitudes of Ida Brun”
2018/2019 Performance and sounds for “Sounds like Catastrophes” by Eva Meyer-Keller (DE), Brandts, Odens, CC, Copenhagen
2019 Performance in “Mundane Heroics” by Kristoffer Ørum, ANTI festival, Kuopio (FI), Bästa Biennal, Lund (SE) ”Live Art for Børn”, Ålborg (DK).

Carnations and Quartz
During our second Live Art for Kids festival, Dagmar performed this piece with Finnish performance artist  Essi Kausalainen in Kristianstad and Ystad.

COLAB Copenhagen
Dagmar also performed with Nigerian performer Odun Orimolade at NLH project space, in the context of our post-colonial collaboration project COLAB Copenhagen in May 2016.

The Attitudes of Ida Brun
In 2017, Dagmar Friis was the lead character in “The Attitudes of Ida Brun”, a virtual reality supported performancce lecture by Live Art Danmark, which we presented at Thorvaldsens Museum in Copenhagen. Ida Brun (1792-1858), a Danish-German lady of the Copenhagen society, was a contemporary of Goethe and Thorvaldsen, who admired her for her live-sculptures, which were called “attitudes. According to Bjørn Nørgaard, these life events made her Denmarks first performance artist.

One of Ida Brun’s attitudes, re-performed by Dagmar Vestergaard Friis.

Sounds Like Catastrophes
Live Art Danmark commissioned German performance artist Eva Meyer-Keller to develop this original work in collaboration with Sybille Müller and six children who performed it. It is part of a series which intuitively researches catastrophes. The piece examines and reproduces the silence and noise, the gently increasing or sudden sounds we associate with catastrophic events.

Dagmar (left) with her co-performers in “Sounds like Catastrophes” by Eva Meyer-Keller (DE), Copenhagen Contemporary 2019.

Mundane Heroics
Dagmar was one of the international group of young performers who participated in “Mundane Heroics”, a performance by Kristoffer Ørum and Nilas Dumstrei, based on LARPs, or Live Action Role Plays. The players created a series of live tableaux in public space using repurposed everyday household objects, to create an own world, at once familiar and strange. 

Collaborating with Kids
In 2019, we conducted a series of interviews with children who participated in our performances, called “Collaborating with Kids”. In this episoade, Dagmar and her brother Konrad talk about several productions by German performer, director and researcher Sibylle Peters, that they experienced or participated in.

About the Artist
Dagmar is the daughter of Live Art Danmarks founders and artistic directors, Ellen Friis and Henrik Vestergaard. From a very young age, Dagmar engaged with our artistic work and has appeared in many performances that we curated and developed.