Undersang

Whoever thinks that a forest is mostly made up of trees should absolutely join this travel group to the Deister near Hannover. This is also an unmapped terrain, cultivated resource, and a romanticized place of longing. In their latest piece, Undersang, Harald Beharie – together with Karoline Bakken Lund, Veronica Bruce, and Christian Beharie – dissects this legendary topos and digs deep into his archive of fictions. The performance-ritual is set in a location between rustling trees, pliable moss carpets, and porous stones: six bodies on the boundaries between fable and science fiction merge there into a single organism through the rhythm of their voices. Singing, dancing, floating and lurking, they imagine – sometimes individually, sometimes collectively – the green thicket beyond binary logic. What are the stories that determine our view of natural spaces?? Whose echo reverberates there? Which voices are overshadowed? Undersang puts fragments into motion in the projection surface of the forest and shakes established narratives.

Harald Beharie is a Norwegian-Jamaican performer and choreographer based in Oslo, Norway. In his/their choreographic practice, which is driven by a desire to dissect established corporeal narratives, he/they explore alternative ways of being together and questions concepts of normativity. Beharie is interested in the unpolished, the self-made and the vulnerability that comes with the unknown. He/they collaborate with other artists in different constellations and contexts and uses dance as a medium to create elusive spaces of ambivalence and fantasy. In 2023/2024 he/they won the Norwegian Critics' Prize for Dance for Undersang.