Onomatopoeia for a Hissing Kettle: Part One
Filmed performance. 2025.
Video still, filmed performance. Grow Productions Aps.
Onomatopoeia for a Hissing Kettle: Part One is a silent story about the claustrophobia of emptiness, the potential of absence, and the necessity of looking beyond the patterns that constitute the normality of society.
A group of beekeepers find themselves in a void while ritualistically carrying out their work. However, the bees, nature, and surroundings are no longer present. The beekeepers struggle to find a common foothold in this limbo, like ghosts reaching out for each other but constantly losing their orientation. Gradually, the void creeps in on them. Their common points of reference slowly drift apart, where absence itself becomes the embodiment of their mutual relationship.
The performance is part of a series about our disappearing world relationship and the broken communities we are a part of. Using traditional mime techniques combined with elements from contemporary dance, the performance is an invitation to let the viewer be a co-creator of the narrative. Mime theatre is used conceptually to illuminate the social contracts we are entangled by and what happens when we lose faith in them.
The work was directed by performance and visual artist Mark Tholander, and performed by Joana Ellen Öhlschläger, André Kaliff, Julie Kunz and Søren Høi.
Through the beekeepers, a multifaceted metaphor about communities and relationship to the surrounding world is presented. The beekeepers are dressed in protective suits against the influence of a world that is not present. As isolated capsules, they lose the possibility of a common connection, and can only find this through shared actions, while clinging to recognisable patterns and points of reference.
The Onomatopoeia series is about togetherness. A community does not exist. It must be invented. Gradually, the belief in the organization of society lives on as a mythology. These mythologies transform into bodily impregnations, or uniforms that we wear. When the pillars of these shared assumptions begin to shake, the house of cards collapses. The first chapter of the Onomatopoeia series still leaves open what comes after the collapse. Dystopia can also open up new beginnings. Future installments in the series will explore what other forms of community we can form after the collapse.
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Below: Photo documentation from Riga Performance Festival, Latvia. The performance was performed as part of the Onomatopoeia project. Photo credit by Arthur Aizikovich and Aman Askarizad.