Image: Landscape in Bodø, Norway
Between//Us
Performing Arts Relay 2024 (Bodø, Norway) – Lucy Coren & Rinchen Dolma
Research focus
For those of us who have not experienced displacement, we live guided by the conviction of what we know around us to be true. Like the language we communicate our identities with, or the familiar shapes of our environment. But what happens when we become displaced from the language and landscape that we’ve known?
This provocation is something we will examine grounded in the question: What happens when two people go on a walk together and neither speaks the same language?
Collaborating with the local community in Bodø, we will engage in an experimental walking series together.
About the researchers
Lucy Coren is a mixed-race theatre producer and theatre-maker who is most interested in theatre as a tool for facilitating conversations between fractured and disparate communities that can activate real personal, cultural and social change. She is committed to co-creating spaces that shift power dynamics, and embolden individuals and communities to shape the world to them, rather than the other way around.
She’s produced for Factory Theatre, Native Earth Performing Arts, Outside the March and was the Acting Artistic Associate for the National Creation Fund.
Past works: Transfers (SummerWorks 2022); How We Play(ed) (Forward March 2023); and It’s a Shame (Summerworks 2024.)
རིན་ཆེན་སྒྲོལ་མ་|Rinchen Dolma is a theatre creator, multidisciplinary artist and veteran community arts practitioner originally from the Himalayas; currently based in Tkarón:to. She is passionate about the intersections between storytelling, community and placemaking as the founder and Artistic Director of MADE IN EXILE: a grassroots community-arts based initiative that engages young Tibetan creatives in exploring their complex identities through contemporary mediums of storytelling in exile.
Rinchen’s recent work includes Orlando (Talk is Free Theatre, 2022), Transfers (SummerWorks, 2022), Eventually, We Land (Tarragon x Toronto Metropolitan University, 2023) and Lysistrata (Toronto Metropolitan University, 2024).
Performing Arts Relay 2024 (Bodø, Norway)
The Performing Arts Relay is a collaboration between organizations based in Canada, Denmark and Norway, each committed to studio-based performance research in theatre, music and dance. We call it the “Relay” because the Lab sessions at the heart of this initiative move from one country to the next, enhancing the intersection of working practices and building a community of artists dedicated to examining how they create and collaborate.
For Performing Arts Relay 2024 in Bodø, Norway, from November 12-15, 2024, we invited artists to propose an idea for an experiment on the broad theme of Language//Landscape. The framing of this theme was meant as an invitation to consider the wide range of possible relationships between these two terms and concepts. The thematic focus includes the 3 countries’ spoken, written and otherwise articulated languages, as well as their physical and cultural geographies, including the Arctic regions, as reflected in the work of the participating artists.
Partner Organizations / Facilitators
- Bruce Barton, School of Creative and Performing Arts (CAN)
- Brian Quirt / Gloria Mok, Nightswimming (CAN)
- Barbara Simonsen, Seachange Lab (DK)
- Susanne Næss, Davvi – Centre for Performing Arts (NOR)