WEEPING MEN
Weeping Men is a bold exploration of Nordic identity and the complexities of whiteness, presented in two immersive formats: an interactive performance installation and a video installation. Weeping Men premieres at Barents Spektakel 2025 in a sauna in Bugøynes, with 7 performances, with a concurrent video installation exhibition in Kirkenes.
It is not a conventional morality play but a sensorial ritual, swinging between laughter and horror. Performed inside saunas by Huutajat, a choir that does not sing, known for their unconventional approach to vocal expression, will weepingly deliver rhythmic complexity with straightforward intensity. We (with)ness them engaging in collective weeping, beating themselves up with birch branches, allowing the toxins to dissipate, so that we may emerge from the sauna a bit warmer and aware.
Collaborators
Composer and performers
Huutajat is a choir that doesn’t sing a note. 20-40 properly dressed men enter the venue with military precision and begin to scream, bellow and shout excerpts from national anthems, children’s ditties or international treaties. Sometimes the text is delivered as a complex rhythmic structure, sometimes as a simple-but-loud reading.
Collaborating artist
Lise Johansson is a visual artist and photographer based in Copenhagen.
The starting point for Johansson’s artistic practice is to create a sense of a distorted reality, where the inspiration for this comes from the borderland that exists between the conscious and the unconscious. ‘The unseen’ takes place in the familiar, and locates itself in the field that blurs the line between reality and fantasy.
Johansson works around the themes of identity and belonging. The images often take departure from physical miniatures of landscapes and architectural spaces, combined with textures and objects photographed to use as building blocks in post processing.
Johansson is interested in people’s shared or individual feelings for the spaces or places they inhabit. Why do we feel that we belong in some places and not in others? Place and identity are closely bound together and people often strongly identify with the places they live in. Their environments shape who they are, and the bonds between person and place can influence culture, politics and social life.
Choreographer and collaborating artist
Aris Papadopoulos is a dancer, maker and performer based in Αthens.
Aris is very keen on the notion of landscape as a cultural construction and juxtaposition of both man-made and natural environments, therefore seeing it as a heavily charged field of potentiality for action, exploration, playfulness and composition, and is distilling that into his own experimentations through visuals and movement. His current personal interest and artistic research explore the multitude of visual and physical representations of everyday encounters with the urban landscape, the designing of processes and concept-writing, interdisciplinary approaches in the urban landscape as a field of potentiality, and the reciprocal scheme of embodying landscape vs shaping an experience.
Co-producer
Pikene på Broen is a collective of curators and producers based in the northeastern Norwegian town of Kirkenes. Pikene på Broen was established in 1996 and has spent the past 20 years realising large and small scale cultural projects – they call these ‘border-crossing exercises’ which provide new perspectives on the north while initiating discussions on themes relevant to the Barents Region
Artistic Director
Tone H. Lorenzen is a director, clown, and performer working in the expanded field of theater and performance art. She is the artistic director of the international performance company CuntsCollective, co-founded in 2018. With a Master of Fine Arts from Dell'Arte International School of Physical Theatre in the USA (2016), Tone specializes in self-producing and co-creating projects that explore profound aesthetic, sociopolitical, and queer feminist perspectives. Her approach blends collective and nomadic principles, fostering collaborations both nationally and internationally. Tone prioritizes challenging geographical and creative boundaries.
