Odin Teatret, besides concentrating on artistic expression through performances, pedagogy and pure research, seeks to enliven the relationship between socially distant individuals and subgroups. Theatre becomes the vehicle to implement an active culture through different activities which release interactions, gathered here under the title of EVENTS. Listed below are some of Odin Teatret's projects which reflect the contemporary role and impact of a theatre laboratory in our multicultural society.

 

Theatre is the specific technique of putting into relation that which is different by making it visible, and the FESTUGE (Festive Week) is an example of how Odin Teatret attempts to realise this in the community. Each Festuge involves the many milieus of our town through a suggestive yet ambiguous theme, confronting crucial local contradictions in the framework of a culture without borders. In a process of empathy and reciprocity, theatre gives dignity to different ways of living, interests, activities and manifestations existing in a community, making them interact beyond their cultural, racial, class or political origins.

 

Abroad and at home, Odin Teatret has developed a particular performance situation based on cultural exchange, which we call BARTER. During a BARTER, Odin Teatret's actors present their work to a specific milieu which, in return, pays with expressions from its own culture: songs, music and dances, biographical accounts, games, food samples, etc. A BARTER is a social interaction that functions in spite of language barriers and cultural differences. A BARTER may take place in crowded urban districts or isolated rural zones, among immigrants, specific ethnic or religious minorities, in hospitals, community centres, prisons, schools, with the fire brigade, the police, a rock club, rappers, a church and its parishioners, the patients of a mental asylum, the children in a kindergarten, etc. A BARTER includes elements that are not necessarily artistic in themselves, but acquire a theatrical value and function, such as sports events, religious ceremonies, fish auctions, military exercises and manoeuvres. A BARTER revitalises the bonds of a professional, religious, ethnical or random community, inducing the feeling of a shared identity versus the 'foreigners' - the actors and their culture.

 

TRANSFORMANCE is an activity that reaches beyond usual theatrical spaces and conventions. It aims at the transformation of a whole milieu - a school or any other institution, a parish, a neighbourhood or a village. TRANSFORMANCE presupposes the practice of theatre as interference, as a factor upsetting the usual daily dynamics and relationships. In TRANSFORMANCE theatre uses its manifold knowledge to free latent energy in a milieu and bring about a constellation of unexpected collaborative bonds. It is a total use of a theatre's know-how concerning expressive communication, nonverbal information, contact and the building of relationships, physical presence and decisional skill, participation and group dynamics, tacit knowledge and its transmission, ideoplastic processes (the capacity to transform thoughts and feelings into disciplined actions and reactions), artistic and practical targeting, intercultural collaboration, planning, realisation, management and networking.

 

Some EVENTS focus on social groups or individuals who normally benefit from less cultural support, such as the TRANSIT FESTIVAL for women working in contemporary theatre all over the world. Others enhance art forms confining with theatre, like the POETRY EVENINGS during which Danish and foreign poets read their texts interspersed with theatrical and musical intermezzos.

 

GUEST PERFORMANCES include all the presentations of visiting theatre groups according to Odin Teatret's policy of hospitality, or of those theatre, music and dance companies which come to Odin Teatret as part of their national or international tours.

 

Odin Teatret has also developed a tradition of transforming recurrent events and anniversaries into special occasions for feasts and meetings, in the form of symposiums and festivals with specific theme for invited international guests, local and international spectators. These are gathered under the title of CELEBRATIONS.

 

THEATRICAL INTERVENTIONS are the numerous activities which involve the entire Odin Teatret or just a few actors. These range from a planned yet unexpected parade surprising people in the street for a spontaneous collective theatre experience, to the opening of a cultural centre, the singing of a birthday song to a deserving citizen, visiting a friend of the theatre, welcoming a guest at the train station or enlivening a political meeting.