alfabet

Three performers conjure onto the stage a wistful apocalypse in which darkness and light, hope and despair, exist side by side. The performance gives shape to the fear that everything we know, the world we have assumed to be permanent and unchanging, may crumble even as we cook dinner and watch children playing in the fading evening light.

Danish poet Inger Christensen published her modern classic in 1981. When alphabet first appeared, it was overshadowed by the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation. More than forty years later, the world is different, yet the experience the piece describes feels strikingly familiar. Once again, we live in a time when the established world order seems uncertain, and awareness of war and ecological crisis accompanies the routines of everyday life.

Directed by Milja Sarkola and choreographed by Maria Saivosalmi, alphabet brings to the stage a poetic celebration of existence through movement and language. In Oscar Rossi’s translation, the poem catalogues the things of existence, calling them vividly into being. The gathering of words becomes an incantation. The more fragile the world grows, the more precious becomes the simple fact that something still exists.

“We are playing a game with the world, and the world is playing its own game with us.”

On stage Jessica Grabowsky, Santtu Karvonen and Robin Svartström.