Managing Discomfort

In total, 16 artists were presented at Husets Teater in the spring of 2024. They aimed to push the spectators out of their comfort zone and evoke discomfort. More importantly, they explored how we collectively manage this discomfort together, in the immediate presence of the theater.

Performing arts no longer need to provide glamour, dreams, and escapism. Today, everyone has their own private stage in their back pocket, where anything is possible, and one can quickly swipe away from any discomfort. We believe that audiences will increasingly seek out the theater space precisely because of its limitations. It is the ideal setting for demanding confrontations with other incomplete bodies; in a real now and a real space. All of which was always the hallmark of performance art

The audience experienced two performances in one evening. In addition to the theater’s black box and the red salon on the first floor, VR works by Danish and international artists were installed in the theater’s foyer. Part of the program also included workshops with the international performers, offering a closer look at their methods and ideas.

Maria Metsalu: Kultuur

Maria Metsalu is an artist who uses her body to explore contemporary issues, often through sexually charged expressions. She sees performance as a radical space where deviation creates new ways of seeing and being seen. In addition to her solo work, she is a co-founder of Young Boy Dancing Group.

Lina Hashim: Odalisque

The work Odalisque draws on Western art history, where binary divisions dominate. Lina Hashim explores her own position as a female visual artist with a Muslim background, as well as the Western, white art historical tradition in which the brown woman is often portrayed as the odalisque – a silent, seductive slave in a harem. Hashim seeks to redefine this narrative and create space for a retelling of the cemented ideology surrounding the erotic harem.

Maria Metsalu: The Well

Maria Metsalu’s The Well follows an isolated figure lowered into a well by four psychoanalysts, tasked with writing a new structure for the world while lying on a leather sofa. The performance creates an erotic mindscape – a secret, confined space for deviant bodies, where the unheard is heard, and the invisible is seen.

Teo Ala-Ruona: Lacuna

Teo Ala-Ruona’s Lacuna is an autofictional body horror performance that invites the audience into a void within the performer’s body. Through the body’s openings and cavities, Ala-Ruona simultaneously seeks to fill and empty, in search of a loving existence within his own body.

Jäger Ooms: Ambient Theatre Fury

Anna Franziska Jäger and Nathan Ooms explore the boundaries of dialogue through various forms of conversation, from therapy to first dates, examining how digitalization affects our subjectivity in times of crisis. Our culture is saturated with digital experiences—from Netflix series to social media—creating a pseudo-activity that numbs our sense of time and demands silence to manage the noise.

Liebmann/Barkan: Don’t Pay Your Debts

In Don’t Pay Your Debts, Andreas Liebmann and Boaz Barkan continue their experimental approach to performance and workshop formats. This time, they explore the poetics of economy.
For years, Liebmann and Barkan have created performances that examine both local and global issues. Their collaboration began with Tårnby Får Besøg, a performance film featuring Tårnby residents reenacting the Hollywood movie E.T.. They later developed the series Total International (Local) in collaboration with Teater Får302, exploring the artist’s role as both a local and global actor.

Sall Lam Toro: Obsidiana, estranha, erótica e ultravioleta

In OBSIDIAN DREAM LOVE LETTERS, Sall Lam Toro created a multimedia installation and performance exploring Black, eco-erotic consciousness through fantastical universes.
In this new version, the scenography has shifted to a green, ultraviolet light, creating a glitch effect. The space is filled with sculptures, lights, and earth, materializing temporal and multidimensional fugitivity, supported by sensual rituals with obsidian and rose quartz.

Martin O’Brien: An Ambulance to the Future (The Second Chance)

“The Grim Reaper stood there. Finally, I saw him. His skeletal form sparkled in the moonlight, and nothing else existed. This was the deal. He reached out and wrapped his cold, bony hand around my skull. I was lost in the darkness of his cape. He drew me near and kissed me. He tasted like death, and I loved it.”

In An Ambulance to the Future (The Second Chance), Death pays a man for sex, and the price is immortality. Combining video, live performance, and parables, the work portrays a life repeated endlessly—a life without the need for water or oxygen. It is a meditation on endings and new beginnings. Martin O’Brien asks what the longing for immortality can teach us about being mortal. The work premiered at Whitechapel Gallery in London in May 2023, where O’Brien was Writer-in-Residence.

Boys* In Sync: Zapfenstreich – Mother Europe

In 2021, Angela Merkel stepped down after 16 years as Germany’s chancellor and was honored with the military ceremony Zapfenstreich. Boys* in Sync reenact the live broadcast of the parade. The five performers and dancers from different European countries examine military choreographies that express masculinity, conformity, and national symbolism. The work explores what is missing in these choreographies and what strategies can be used to deconstruct them—how to find the cracks and fill them with air, wigs, and intimacy.

Aaron Williamson: Let Down Your Hair

Aaron Williamson is a deaf performance artist who challenges audiences’ (lack of) expectations of disabled people through humor. In Let Down Your Hair, he criticized Husets Teater’s inadequate accessibility. The title references the fairy tale Rapunzel—where a young woman was imprisoned in a tower, letting a prince climb up her long hair. The performance took place at the top of the building, which had neither an elevator nor a ramp, while the audience stood outside in the rain. In doing so, he inverted the power dynamic between performer and audience, disabled and “normal.”

Beck Heiberg: Blue Swallowing

“Moan for me. Take care of me. Fuck me. Use my tears as lube and let the swallows’ screams consume the sorrow.”

Blue Swallowing is a performance exploring the intersection of grief and sensuality, where seasonal shifts, loss, and intense joy merge into a melancholic experience. Alone on stage, Beck meets the music and the words, seeking to share overwhelming emotions with the audience. Blue Swallowing premiered at Dansehallerne in 2022.

Samira Elagoz: Seek Bromance

Seek Bromance is a trans romance between insta-reality and sci-fi dystopia, following the relationship between two transmasculine artists, Samira Elagoz and Cade Moga. They met at the beginning of the pandemic, both with a history as feminine performers but with different views on masculinity. The film documents their relationship from meeting to breakup, as well as Elagoz’s farewell to his femme identity.
In a desolate yet beautiful world, they explore the dynamics of masculinity and femininity with only a car, cash, and testosterone as companions.

Elagoz, who previously examined cis men and masculinity from a female perspective, shifts perspectives in this work, also capturing his own transition. Seek Bromance (2021) marks a shift in his artistic practice and identity.

Iggy Malmborg: SATAN

In SATAN, Swedish artist Iggy Malmborg tells his supposedly true story in six chapters and a prologue. The story follows his turbulent journey from a strict Christian upbringing in the countryside through friendships, sins, and homelessness to his performance at Husets Teater in Copenhagen. But is it really that simple…?

The work explores the role of illusion in theater and celebrates the oral storytelling tradition, where a performer—using only body and voice—can transport the audience to distant places and times, evoking recognition, awe, or horror. We meet a hero who wants to be a villain but fails. SATAN questions ethics, truth, and storytelling on stage—isn’t it always just a game?

Jessie Kleemann: The Iceflake

The performance is inspired by childhood games of jumping from ice floe to ice floe as the ice broke up in spring. Now, it is melting season all the time—the ice is melting, the world is melting, and we jump, run, and flee from place to place. The ice floe is “just a floe,” but it comes from both poles. Imagine the whale and its belly, and us trying to keep its mouth shut.

Molly Haslund: Virtual Waltz

Virtual Waltz is a musical VR performance that explores the intense atmosphere and nervous energy that arise just before stepping on stage, as well as the rituals used to cope with them—such as writing postcards, meditating, or eating cheese.

Seimi Nørregaard: Do Let Us Know

A simple VR work that invites you to open your mouth and let your voice be heard—to roar into the world. Seimi Nørregaard (b. 1975) is a Danish stage and visual artist whose practice explores space and spatiality through the staging of bodies, text, light, and sound.

Kira O’Reilly: what if this was the only world she knew III

what if this was the only world she knew is a series of performance works started in 2018. Part III utilizes virtual reality, where small, strange actions repeat, loop, and sometimes reverse. With eggs and a glittering green sequin dress—recurring motifs in O’Reilly’s works—a surreal dimension emerges within the viewer’s fixed reality.