Ripples
Can we create a positive climate ripple effect across the sea?
Combining performing arts and environmentalism, we set sail for hope, for action and for change.
Premiering July 15th 2022, we toured Denmark, Finland, Estonia and Norway during the summer of 2022 - with and on a sail ship from 1926, and powered by the wind.
Ripples is a contemporary circus performance about eco-grief and utopia, sailing across the Baltic Sea to inspire people to act for a more sustainable future. The performing arts company Acting for Climate (NO) joins forces with Festival Norpas (FI) and Hawila Project (DK) to bring people together for a transformative experience of a more sustainable today.
The artistic director of the performance will be Hanne Friis, for whom the project combines her passions of performing arts and environment. "We challenge our times, inspiring people to act towards climate change, to reflect on how Humanity treats Nature. Let us sail around and enter the harbours and hearts of people", she declares.
The tour sails from harbour to harbour with S/V Swallow, a two-masted wooden sailing ship from 1926. We set off from Denmark to harbours in Finland, Estonia and Norway, in which we play the performance Ripples and engage in local encounters on sustainability. Ripples experiments on creating a whole new standard of sustainability as touring artists and provides meeting points for collaboration and exchange with local audience. Swallow acts as a site-specific stage, accommodation and means of transport for the group.
Ripples invites you on board a voyage into the future, a mourning ritual for the past and to question the present. We will explore how to live in a balanced and just society of the future, and reflect this in our artistic expression in the present. Seven artists embody ecological grief and hope for the future within the ship’s magnificent framework. A magical universe of circus, dance, physical theatre, music and storytelling unfolds from aft to bow and all the way up to the top of the masts.
The inspiration for the music for Ripples comes from the ripples themselves: the vibrations that find resonances in us and between us; in our bodies and in sound. To the composer this means resonances as in acoustic feedback, which plays a big part in her music. She also experiments with ripples as tremolos of different speeds and explores how they interact with each other. From these starting points, the music has been created during a process of exploring climate change from many varying perspectives.
The aim of the tour is to question the values our society is based upon and to inspire curiosity and discussions about sustainability in the present.
We set sail for hope, for action, and for change.
If action triggers action - can our art create a ripple effect for climate action that can spread across the sea?
RIPPLES 2022
Director: Hanne Trap Friis
Artists and co-creators: Abigael Rydtun Winsvold, Emma Langmoen, Heidi Miikki, Lucie Piot, Ole Skovgård Dampe, Marie Binda, Max Behrendt
Project leaders: Abigael Winsvold & Emma Langmoen
Producers team: Federica Parise, Ronja Tammenpää, Irina Pleva, Ania Lewandowska
Composer: Annelie Nederberg
Costumes designer: Michiel Tange van Leeuwen
Rigging design: Matt Horton
Tour manager: Isabella de Judicibus
Recorded voices and text contribution: Samwel Ojijo (Kenya), Daniela Cubero Murillo (Costa Rica), Makau Jonah (Kenya),
Yeonjoo Lee (South Korea), Zeineb Chermiti (Tunisia), Abhijith Nag Balasubramanya (India), Kenneth Owino (Kenya)
In collaboration with Hawila Project & Festival Norpas
Special thanks to all the volunteers!
Ripples premiered July 15th 2022 in Holbæk, Denmark, beginning a sailing tour which went on until September 14th.
Entry is free to all Ripples performances!
The length of the performance is approximately 70 minutes.
HOLBÆK (DK) with Hawila Project
July 15–17, 2022
Krags Brygge, 4300 Holbæk, Denmark
15.7. Hawila Presentation 17:30, Premiere 18:30
16.7. Ripples 13:00 & 18:00
17.7. Ripples 13:00
TAALINTEHDAS (FI) with Festival Norpas
August 4–7, 2022
Rantatie 1, 25900 Taalintehdas, Finland
4.8. Ripples 17:00
5.8. Workshop for youth under 30 12:00
6.8. Workshop for youth under 30 14:00
7.8. Ripples 12:00
HELSINKI (FI) with Dance Theatre Hurjaruuth
August 11–13, 2022
Kalkkihiekantori, 00980 Helsinki, Finland
11.8. Ripples 18:00
12.8. Ripples 18:00
13.8. Ripples 13:00 & 18:00
SAAREMAA (EE) with Big Wolf Company and Estonian Contemporary Circus Development Centre
August 20–21, 2022
Kuressaare, 93815 Saare County, Estonia
20.8. Ripples 13:00 & workshop 16:30
21.8. Ripples 13:00 & 18:00
COPENHAGEN (DK)
with Foreningen Ofelia Plads
September 2–4, 2022
Kvæsthusbroen, 1250 Copenhagen, Denmark
2.9. Ripples 14:00
3.9. Ripples 13:00 & 18:00
4.9. Ripples 13.00 & 18:00, Hawila Project presentation 19:15
TØNSBERG (NO) with Nøtterøy Kulturhus
September 11–14, 2022
Tønsberg, Norway
11.9. Ripples 13:00 & 18:00
12.9. Ripples 13:00
13.9. Ripples 12:00 & 18:00
14.9. Ripples 13:00
In between these locations, nature will decide where the tour will go. Instead of fighting the premises of nature we will try to work with them.
Artistic team
Hanne Trap Friis
Hanne Trap Friis is a multidisciplinary artist who lives between Denmark and Greenland. She is the artistic director of Teater freezeProductions. The company produces new Danish drama, visually beautiful and temperamental theater. The Theater works with current issues and wants us to pause, think, contemplate, sense and converse.
Annelie Nederberg
Annelie is a Stockholm-based composer, performer and sound artist. She has a background as a theatre sound designer, but now focuses on creating music for performing arts such as dance, theatre and performances/installations. She also composes acousmatic music and performs live electronic music. During her doctoral studies in electronic music at University of Surrey she developed an instrument based on acoustic feedback, which is one of her main expressive tools. As a researcher and lecturer at KMH in Stockholm her main interests are corporeality, contemporary animism, movement and feedback.
Abigael Winsvold
Abigael is one of the co-founders of Acting for Climate, and has her whole artistic life had an urge in finding ways to express issues related to climate change and sustainability through arts. In her artistic work she focuses on interdisciplinary work by combining dance, theatre and circus, with focus on combining scientific research in the art-processes. She is specialized in the circus disciplines rope (CODARTS Rotterdam) and partner acrobatics (AMoC Copenhagen).
Emma Langmoen
Acting for Climate board member Emma is a circus artist by education, and an activist by heart. These days, almost all her days are on tour and creating with Acting for Climate, but she also works as a freelancer, and is the Artistic Director of Oslo Nysirkus. Emma is interested in physical and verbal poetry, site-specific work, and the power of art to create new narratives. As one of the two project leaders of Ripples, she is super excited to go sail touring again.
Max Behrendt
Max has worked as a pair acrobat for over ten years but has lately changed focus to a more theatrical approach with elements of magic and clownery. He grew up in Sweden but did his higher education in France where he has since stayed and worked. Merging his concern for the climate crisis with the performance arts has long been a dream but it wasn't until the collaboration with Acting for Climate that this became reality. He's looking forward to sailing, performing, meeting people and sending Ripples of climate action all around the Baltic Sea.
Ole Dampe
Ole is a Danish circus artist who went through youth circus as a child, explored musical and theatrical performance as a teenager and traveled Europe as a young adult, in search of learning circus technique, finding his acrobatic partner Marie along the way.
Ole is thrilled to join Ripples and to sail all over the Baltic Sea this summer!
Marie Binda
Marie is a French artist who grew up in acrobatic gymnastics and found her home in circus as a young adult with Ole. Using acrobatics such as russian cradle, hand to hand, and banquine as her medium, she feels in her element, when she flies through the air.
Lucie Piot
Lucie Piot is a freelance contemporary dancer. She studied contemporary dance in Copenhagen where she graduated with a BFA in Dance and Choreography at the Danish National School of Performing Arts, in 2020. Her artistic interests lies within social and environmental questions with emphasis on musicality and playfulness. After being part of the Greenhouse Network, she is thrilled to continue working with Acting for Climate for this production.
Heidi Miikki
Heidi works in the core crew of Acting for Climate with several projects. Heidi is a Helsinki-based dancer and circus artist who has a dancer’s education from Outokumpu, Finland and studied circus both at AFUK in Copenhagen and BA degree at Turku Arts Academy. She dances and jumps on the tightrope, on the ground, in a harness, and climbs the pole and trees. She is an environmentalist to whom empathy, caring and meeting are the core of being.
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