A symbiosis of music and movement, Memorium emerged from a collaboration between the performance ensemble Scenatet, the Greek-Swedish choreographer Tim Matiakis, the Danish composer Niels Rønsholdt, and the world-renowned house dancer Marie Kaae Schmidt. The collaboration was described as “extraordinarily well-balanced” by the jury of CPH STAGE, who selected Memoriam for their international program and praised the ability of the performance to explore the intrinsic loneliness of human existence while creating a sense of magical interconnectedness between the performers on stage.

Memoriam gives insight into the routines, practices, and memories of a secret community. The audience enter an experience where immersive sonic landscapes, colored textiles and choreography create the sensation of a timeline that, while strikingly coherent, can be experienced as situated in both past and future. The link between the two is the space explored by Memoriam. Working with the mirror as both an important aesthetic device and a metaphor, the performance unfolds as a sensuous universe of both reminiscences and premonitions.

The work was premiered at MUSIKHUSET Copenhagen 2022. 
In 2023 Memoriam was selected for CPH STAGE International program. The international jury said:

“This collaboration is extraordinarily well-balanced – between unusual collaborators such as one of Denmark’s best house dancers, a music ensemble playing new compositional music while all the creatures are dressed in a future universe. Almost ironically, this work tells the story of how all human relationships contain a paradoxical loneliness in a way that makes all the future creatures on stage seem almost magically connected.”

Memoriam is an interdisciplinary performance with five performing musicians and one dancer.

Duration 60 min

Memoriam is initiated, commissioned and produced by Scenatet.

“MEMORIAM is performing arts poetry that explodes genres and times
MEMORIAM are universes of abstraction that are not captured by fixed sentences
MEMORIAM are worlds of three-dimensional extension, soundscapes and curved textiles 
MEMORIAM calls for bodily texts that transform wordlessness”

“As an experimental ensemble, Scenatet is interested in staging and exploring space in order to break away from conventional concert formats. They like to mix contrasting genres and styles, and emphasize the great range in new music.”

“It is essentially a Gesamtkunstwerk, where the individual elements are basically equated with equal value. That is the music, the words, the musicians and the dancer and the “image”. A total of 6 people perform on the beautiful playground: a mirror floor.”

“It is incredibly fine and poignant, but at the same time abstract and indefinable. It is simply something that needs to be experienced, not retold.”

“Memoriam’ mourns something that has been lost, and perhaps it is language. Perhaps it is the mind.”

“Anna Berit Asp Christensen and the avant-garde ensemble Scenatet have all the prerequisites to close in on themselves, with the overload of artistic talent and expertise that the members together possess. They could be a nerdy research team sitting in a dusty library, developing artistic formulas that posterity would praise them for and that artists would follow for many years. But Scenatet doesn’t close in on itself, they invite, they lure, they develop and they create, they take their talent seriously, and they live up to the old adage nobility obliges – modernly rethought.”

Concept and staging: 
Niels Rønsholdt, Tim Matiakis and Anna Berit Asp Christensen
Music and text: 
Niels Rønsholdt
Choreography:
 Tim Matiakis
Dancer: 
Marie Kaae Schmidt
Performing musicians: 
Signe Asmussen (voc), Mathias Monrad Møller (voc), Anna Jalving/Kasia Ziminska (vio & vla), Katrine Grarup Elbo (vio), Matias Seibæk (perc)
Lightdesign: Jonatan Winbo
Lighttechnician: Imre Zsibrik
Costumes and styling: Ylva Falk
Make-up and hair: Leila Belangeon Bouaziz
Artistic director: Anna Berit Asp Christensen

The performance is created in close collaboration between all above.

Statens Kunstfond, Augustinus Fonden, Det Obelske Familiefond, KODA Culture, Knud Højgaards Fond, 15 Juni Fonden, The City of Copenhagen, William Demant Fonden.