Come together
When two of Iceland’s most renowned artists started talking about getting married, it resulted in a four-hour stage performance involving a dance company, a group of famous friends, a world-known composer and the American artist Matthew Barney.
It’s not often you see the artistic director of a national ballet company dressed up as a clown and tap dance during the intermission of one of her own productions. But this is exactly what happens at the Reykjavik City Theatre this evening, as Erna Ómarsdóttir drags her tapping board through the foyer, sometimes hitting it with a saucepan, sometimes dancing on it. Across the room, Ómarsdóttir’s long-time partner, the musician Valdimar Jóhannsson, is doing ceramics dressed in a leather mask with antlers and pink heels. There are stalls of people selling things like T-shirts, artworks and jewellery, which make the entire space feel less like a theatre and more like a fairground.
“We wanted to create a kind of festival”, says Ómarsdottir, when I caught up with her earlier in the evening.
“Ideally, we wanted people to come early after work, but you know, everybody’s busy”, she says with a shrug.
She then grabs my arm and adds:
“You know the performance is very long, don’t you? We go on for four hours. Have you had some food? Good. Then you’ll be fine.”
Sacrifice is part dance performance, part visual art, brought together by a group of artist whose friendships has been formed through years of collaboration. There’s Ragnar Kjartansson – the Icelandic performance artist who was called “one of the most brilliant artists at work today” by The Guardian, after his exhibition at The Barbican in London last summer – and composer Bryce Dessner of the indie band The National. There’s the Swedish experimental singer Sofia Jernberg, American artist Matthew Barney and visual artist Gabriela Fridriksdottír, who had Ómardsdóttir dancing in one of her videos at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
“Erna is like a force of nature”, says Fridriksdottír, who met Ómardsdottir when they were both living in Brussels in the early 2000s.
“With her, it’s not about talking, it’s about doing things. She attracts people because she has a natural way of speaking with her body, so that everyone understands. She’s really good at putting emotions into action. This is the way I love to work, just doing things and trying them out, keeping it open and experimental”, she adds.
Perhaps it’s this openness that explains the wide and rather impressive list of collaborations throughout Ómardsdóttir’s career, from Jan Fabre in her early years in Brussels to Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Les Ballet C de la B, Meg Stuart and Sasha Waltz. Her most defining collaboration is perhaps with Björk, who is one of Ómardsdóttirs closest friends and remains a sort of unnamed presence in our conversation, as she has also been instrumental in bringing the group together (Björk is also the ex-wife of Barney and the mother of his daughter). They form a strong circle of friends from which anything, it seems, can emerge.
“I think we’re a kind of family now”, says Fridriksdottír.
“We don’t even question why we do things. We just pick up the phone and say: What do you think about this?”
The idea for Sacrifice came about four years ago, when Erna Ómardsdóttir and Valdimar Jóhannsson discussed whether to get married or not. The couple met when they were both living in Brussels and have since collaborated widely and also formed the music band Lazyblood.
“We heard that Alejandro Jodorowsky had directed the wedding of Marilyn Manson and Dita von Teese, so we thought we could do something similar. We have all these amazing friends, so we thought perhaps we could ask them for help”, says Ómarsdóttir as we sit down for a talk.
“We didn’t want to do just the wedding, but all the main rituals of life, so we asked Gabriela to do the last rite, Ragnar to do the confirmation and Matthew to do the wedding”, explains Jóhannsson.
“Matthew immediately wanted to do it, but when he came here and looked at the theatre, he didn’t really like it”, Ómarsdóttir says.
“I don’t think he really likes theatre, or maybe it’s just this building, which is particularly ugly”, admits Jóhannsson with a gaze through the foyer of The City Theatre, where a poster for the musical Mamma Mia is prominently displayed.
“But then he discovered that the theatre is actually attached to a shopping mall, and that got him really inspired. That’s when things started to happen. We had a lot of coffee in the shopping mall, talking about what we could do.”
The collaboration with Matthew Barney resulted in an 80-minute video installation depicting the wedding, complete with bachelor parties, groomsmen and bridesmaids, all of whom are people who work at the mall. The video also features Swedish vocalist Sofia Jernberg as a donut vendor, a role she reprises on stage and in the foyer during the intermission, when the whole space is transformed into a bustling marketplace. The couple met Jernberg on a trip to Greenland through the artist network Far North, during which they got stuck in a blizzard. But the extreme circumstances of the situation didn’t stop Ómardsdóttir from forming a new artistic friendship.
“We did a lot of Inuit throat singing while we were waiting to get out”, she explains to me.
“It was really great, actually.”
Sacrifice isn’t so much a performance as an experience. It’s a hybrid between several art forms, moving through all the main rituals in life in a way that is strange, funny and moving. The confirmation, a 30-minute dance performance by Ragnar Kjartansson and the choreographer Margrét Bjarnadóttir, is especially gripping. Here eight female dancers move to music while playing guitar dressed in classic Levi’s jeans and white T-shirts.
“The initial idea was to do a straightforward Lutheran confirmation on stage, although slightly more extremist”, says Jóhannsson, who taught all the dancers to play guitar.
“But then we started to talk about music and how this is often what saves you in your youth, kind of like a gospel. You have your special song that helps you get through things, whether you’re angry with your parents or just feeling depressed.”
Kjartansson and Margrét Bjarnadóttir have previously collaborated in Kjartansson’s show at the Barbican in London.
“With Raki and me, I don’t think we had one meeting about this work, we just talked about it whenever we hung out”, Bjarnadóttir explains.
“Or maybe we didn’t need to talk about it, there’s just so much trust. This is something you usually have to build up with someone you just started working with, but we don’t have to do that because it’s already there. We trust each other completely.”
When I ask them how they managed to build such a unique environment for collaboration, Jóhannsson immediately replies:
“It’s a small island. Then the artworld is even smaller than that, and within the artworld, you have your group, which is even smaller. You quickly find the people you want to hang out with. It’s more like gangs of people as opposed to genres; a group of friends consisting of musicians, artists, dancers, choreographers who just start doing things together. Then there’s another gang doing their thing.”
Perhaps this is what Sacrifice ultimately is, a circle of friends doing their thing. This particular evening in Reykjavik, the theatre is packed with people, and during the next few months, the performance will go on tour. But what about the marriage? I wonder. Did that actually happen?
“Not yet”, Erna Ómardsdóttir says with a laugh.
“But who knows. If we survive this project, maybe it will.”
This article was written for the second issue of the Arctic Arts Magazine Høtt, which was also edited by Kristin.