The Wardrobe
Performance. 2024. Premiered at Kunsthal Aarhus as a part of Ensembles and Monsters.
Curated by Seolhui Lee.
The Wardrobe combines performance, mime, theater, and concert. The performance focused on togetherness, ranging from family to society. The family gathering is a personal experience that most people have an intimate relationship with - but at the same time the idea of the harmonious nuclear family is used politically as an ideal image of society. This creates a structural normality that excludes those who do not fit into the norm. In this way, our ideas about the community of the family are connected to the way we create communities in society. But what about the family that doesn‘t fit together? What about that and those who do not fit into society‘s normality? Following this, The Wardrobe works with the idea of community on multiple scales: from personal, everyday experiences to experiences of cohesion on a wider, societal level.
Performance. Premiered at Kunsthal Aarhus. Curated by Seolhui Lee.
A group resembling a family is depicted. They are trying to get together, participating in the act of beekeeping as a shared tradition. But they are haunted and driven by nostalgia for what they once were. The suits become a skin that provides a uniformity, ensuring a likeness as a group, but which is also obscuring their identities and individuality, encapsulating them in an impenetrable shell of isolation from the outside world. Gradually, things are turned upside down. In this, the family becomes fantasy. The wardrobe, traditionally a vessel for our outer layers - the clothes we wear to face the world - becomes a threshold that challenges viewers to reconsider their relationship with everyday objects and the natural world.
In the end, the beekeeping family serves as an allegory for our times. Their struggle reflects a grappling with identity, belonging, and the ever-changing nature of human relationships. The interpersonal relationship is broken, at the same time as nature disappear into a void. We carry with us the challenge to look beyond conventional definitions of family and community, and to imagine new ways of being together in a world that often seems designed to keep us apart. What is togetherness? With whom and for whom? What is kinship? And could the fragmented family serve as another model of being together?
Filmed by Jacob Juhl and August Juhl.
The mime techniques in The Wardrobe are a testament to the suggestive power and thus the audience‘s role in creating the narrative. The audience leans forward, straining to see what isn‘t there. We‘re reminded that the structures we often take for granted – family, society, nation – are, in essence, collective beliefs. They exist because we agree they exist. A shared fiction that shapes our reality. These beliefs can distance ourselves from each other and the world at large. But what happens when we begin to question these assumptions? The performance suggests that in this questioning lies the potential for reimagining of our social bonds.
Performed by Mark Tholander in collaboration with:
Kasper Jensen (mime choreography)
Laura Marie Madsen (vocals and songwriting)
Søren Høi (rhythmic composition and drums)
Sarah Owens (trumpet)
Performance. Premiered at Kunsthal Aarhus. Curated by Seolhui Lee.
Photo: Jacob Friis-Holm Nielsen.