Image: Landscape in Bodø, Norway (Gloria Mok)
Performing Arts Relay Lab
Artists from Denmark, Norway and Canada come together for a series of international artistic laboratories
Performing Arts Relay was a series of artistic research labs, each hosted by one of the Relay partners in Norway, Canada and Denmark. In each lab, artists came together to explore, exchange, and share their artistic practice. The artistic work in the labs is free of the demands of production. The hosting partners facilitate and frame the lab work with questions, themes, individual and collaborative tasks to promote the artists’ awareness of their methods and artistic practices.
The participating artists proposed an idea for an experiment, a question or a field of investigation on the theme Language//Landscape – and explored their ideas in a process of practice and exchange, with each other and with local participants. Each lab included daily hikes to inspire artists with the landscape of each location, followed by studio sessions designed to reflect on and share each person’s approach to creation.
The focus of the labs is the variety of the countries’ languages and (inner and outer) geographies as reflected in the work of the participating artists. The thematic starting point was Language//Landscape, a broad theme that could be interpreted in multiple ways by the artists, as they explored their own and each other’s working practice(s), mapping pathways that reflect the Language of Landscapes and the Landscape of Languages.
Relay History
The first Relay series took place between 2016-2018 with labs held in Reykjavik (Iceland), Hammerfest (Norway), Aarhus (Denmark) and Calgary (Canada). This was an initiative designed first and foremost to share how artists in the performing arts work, inviting one another into their creative processes, free from the pressures of developing a new work. Each lab was designed by the facilitators in that country and each took very different forms.
This initial Relay was formulated in 2015 during a conference hosted in Aarhus celebrating Seachange Lab’s RAPP Research in Artistic Practice Programme. Seachange’s Artistic Director, Barbara Simonsen, Brian, and representatives from other performing arts lab organizations discussed Barbara’s proposal to host a series of labs in the form of a relay, in which each helped shape the next and which would accumulate and share knowledge over several years across national borders and disciplines and methodologies.
Following the Covid-19 pandemic, the partners regrouped and initiated a second series for 2024-2026 that would include 3 components: a residency in Bodø, Norway, hosted by Davvi – Centre for Performing Arts; on online exchange hosted by Nightswimming and the University of Calgary’s School of Creative and Performing Arts; and a residency hosted by Seachange near Aarhus, Denmark.
We decided a thematic framework would assist in identifying artists and projects that would fuel the artistic exchange, and settled on Language//Landscape to reflect the multi-lingual nature of the participants and to align with Barbara’s unique and powerful approach to ‘mapping’ artistic process, a method in which participants are invited to map / draw their experience of the daily hike, the process of making a new project and/or their approach to creation more broadly.
Read about Lucy Coren and Rinchen Dolma‘s experience in Bodø in their final report.
Col Cseke‘s report on his Aarhus residency can be read here.
Relay partners
The Performing Arts Relay partners share a passion for artistic research and lab work for performing arts professionals. We believe that artistic research is a necessity, not a luxury, and essential for artists to continue to grow and develop, all through their career. As project partners we are dedicated to providing a solid framework for lab work to take place, and we feel that the labs we create together, combining practice and reflection in a professionally facilitated and structured frame, are an important contribution to expanding the horizons, knowledge and skills of the participating artists as well as our own.
School of Creative and Performing Arts (CAN) – Bruce Barton
Seachange Lab (DK) – Barbara Simonsen, Teresa Ariosto, Nicola Visser
Nightswimming (CAN) – Brian Quirt, Gloria Mok, Sierra Haynes
Davvi – Centre for Performing Arts (NOR) – Susanne Næss, Anita Bjørkli, Magda Nordstrøm
Looking Back – Dislocation / Relocation
by Brian Quirt
As I reflect on 10 years of the Performing Arts Relay, part of me is simply surprised that it has happened, let alone completed multiple lab events in Canada, Denmark, Iceland, and Norway. This seems a minor miracle, not only because funding is sparse for this type of artistic gathering, particularly one that is nomadic, sporadic, non-generative (at least in conventional terms), multi-national, cross-disciplinary and at its heart, investigative.
Funding has been a perpetual challenge and hindrance, but clearly the artists and organizations have made it happen regardless. Yet I really don’t want to focus here on the money. The miracle is that these organizations continue after all these years to believe that bringing performance makers together across all those differences, without regard to outcomes, is too valuable to let the obstacles win. We have persevered, and the ‘results’, while ephemeral are significant, moving, beautiful and long-lasting.
Iceland. 2016. We gathered at the Dance Atelier, organizers and a group of dancers. Barbara introduced us to her mapping exercise, in which we are invited to draw a map of a current project or process on large sheets of paper. I pick a past project, experimenting with Barbara’s experiment to test what it might offer me. And it offered much: a vivid revisitation of a show I loved that revealed anew many aspects of design and invention that have since shaped my recent creative work. Who could ask for more?
Looking back on the sessions I have helped make happen, and that I’ve been honoured to attend, I see now that I thought the power of these gatherings was dislocation – that dislocating the participants geographically, perhaps culturally, often linguistically, and by intention, artistically, would nudge each person toward perspectives that were new to them, that offered ways of looking at their own practice through a generous, insightful and collaborative process of studio work and social engagement. And I, for one, was dislocated, visiting cities and sites and landscapes that were new to me, conversing with artists I had never met, examining my ways of working through Barbara’s careful and sometimes magical mapping exercise.
Yet, as the events continued, from Aarhus to Reykjavik to Calgary to Bodø and back to a forest outside Aarhus, I discovered that the operative experience, for me, was not dislocation. It was relocation. I wasn’t disrupting my practice, although I was open to that possibility. I was relocating my vantage point, yes geographically and among languages I don’t speak and processes I don’t share (all valuable and immersive relocations) – but it feels today that what stands out to me now is that I temporarily and invaluably relocated the position from which I looked at how I create performances. I didn’t create a new map or a new process. I saw my way freshly, and returned from our most recent gathering near Aarhus, maps in hand, to land back in my landscape, literal and figurative, not changed, but refreshed by a relocation of my self and my way of seeing.
Denmark. 2025. A different studio. Barbara’s process has evolved to incorporate daily walks in the local landscape, rain and shine, to insist that we bring all our senses of the world to the surface and filter our working ways through that lens. This is equal parts simple and sophisticated. My maps are denser. More colourful and more investigative. More revealing. I have traveled from the short-term dislocation that made Reykjavik so powerful, to a more lasting and more potent relocation of my senses and visions.
It turns out that we can ask for more, and that with time, patience, determination, the Performing Arts Relay has gifted me, and I believe all participants, with perspectives that could only have risen up in this miraculous context.
Brian Quirt is the Artistic Director of Nightswimming.
Relay Bodø – November 12-15, 2024: artist participants
- Dordi Strøm, scenographer, costume designer and writer (NOR).
- Eva Svaneblom, dance artist (NOR).
- Lucy Coren, theatre maker (CAN).
- Rinchen Dolma, director, dramaturge, performer (CAN).
- Nicola Visser, dance artist (DK).
- Jori Snell, physical performer and visual artist (DK).
1. Barbara Simonsen, Eva Svaneblom, Dordi Strøm, Jori Snell, Nicola Visser, Rinchen Dolma, Gloria Mok at dinner.
2. Rinchen Dolma in rocky terrain in Bodø.
3. Barbara Simonsen & Brian Quirt on a grassy hike in Bodø.
Relay Canada – June 3, 2025
Canadian facilitators hosted an online lab session which included all of the participating artists and facilitators. It was designed as a creative bridge introducing the artists who attended in Bodø with the artists who would be in Aarhus, inviting all participants to share reflections and expectations about their creative work.
Relay Aarhus – September 29-October 3, 2025: artist participants
- Col Cseke, theatre maker, director, deviser, Deaf-Disability-Mad Theatre advocate, podcaster and artistic director (CAN).
- Valentina Martinez Mariscal, dance artist, choreographer rooted in Latin American and Afro-Cuban dance traditions (NOR).
- Stine Marcinkowski Pettersson, dancer, performer, choreographer, director, teacher, therapist and project manager (DK).
Performing Arts Relay 2024-2026 is supported by Nordic Culture Fund, The Norwegian Barents Secretariat and Aarhus Municipality.
1. Relay Aarhus group – Top L-R: Nicola Visser, Stine Marcinkowski Pettersson, Valentina Martinez Mariscal, Magda Nordstrøm, Brian Quirt, Barbara Simonsen, Teresa Ariosto. Bottom L-R: Col Cseke, Gloria Mok, Sierra Haynes (Mathilde).
2. Sierra Haynes in the vast landscape of Mols Bjerge National Park (Gloria Mok).
3. Magda Nordstrøm petting a horse at Earthwise Residency (Gloria Mok).
Reflections on the Relay in Denmark
Sierra Haynes, Nightswimming’s 2025 Dramaturgy Intern, joined us in Denmark to absorb the projects and process, and to create a short audio documentary capturing the voices of Brian and Barbara and many of the Relay artists…and the landscape we visited each day. Listen to her documentary called ‘Revealing the Subconscious Artist’.
