EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS (video can be seen here)

About Everything That Happens

Everything That Happens is an ongoing performance project that was conceived as a living sculpture. The first performance took place in Copenhagen in 2009. See below for details.

By "ongoing performance project" I mean that it is my goal to bring the performance to as many cities, squares, spaces as possible. Every incarnation is different and responds to the site where it happens.

The latest performance happened at Evergreen Brickworks in Toronto, Canada, on October 29th 2011, during the event "Art Fair Confidential" in connection with the Toronto Art Fair. The performance was made possible by AGAC (contemporary art galleries association) and Galerie Lacerte.

Order met chaos on Rådhuspladsen.more photos

“Everything That Happens” was a performance, by Julie Tremblay in collaboration with Nana Francisca Schottländer, that blends sculpture, dance and happening. The performance was presented on Rådhuspladsen (Town Hall Square) in Copenhagen from 4pm to 5.30pm. Rådhuspladsen is the busiest square in Copenhagen.

The performance was conceived by Julie Tremblay and was meant as a living sculpture. 16 performers moved to a choreography by Nana Francisca Schottländer, inspired by fractal geometry and chaos theory. A fractal is: "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole, a property called self-similarity.” (from wikipedia). Chaos theory shows us, through mathematical formulas, a pattern for all, even for what appears at first chaotic. In other words they show us, through repeated patterns, forms that bind the world and the universe together, from the infinitely small to the infinitely big.

The performers, in their umbrella spheres, followed a definite, recurring geometric pattern that first divided them before re-uniting them, before re-dividing them and so on, over a period of one and a half hour. The performance met Copenhageners and tourists during one of the busiest time of the week on Råshuspladsen (Town Hall Square). The structure of the choreography met the seemingly un-structured movement of the crowd, which unassumingly became a part of the performance, by juxtaposing their flow to that of the choreography.

However, within the structure of the choreography, the performers were free to improvise as they pleased. The umbrellas went quickly from being a shelter, where one can be protected from the elements, to being a symbol of fragility and memories of a storm past, a broken home. The movements of the performers and their interactions with the “umbrella-spheres” opened up to wealth of metaphors, from birth to death and just about everything in between, where the spectator was welcome to create his/her own story.

The performers were: Barthelot Ekeme Same, Maria Jørgensen Kaack, Laura Baruël, Anna Luna Holmberg, Anja Karoline Karup Nielsen, Keren Gelfer, Aviaja Kragh, Ida Møntegaard Fredericia, Karl William Fegerlund Brekke, Nele Rickelt, Zenia Helene Madsen, Amalie Obitz, Aya Urhammer, Naja Jessen, Adrian Ulrich Skjoldborg, Lotus Omim
About the crowd’s reaction
The performance started with all the performers gathered together, under their collapsed“super-umbrella”, inside a pentagon drawn in the middle of the square. People quickly gathered around. The performers opened their umbrellas, creating a sphere or bubble around themselves. They got up and after a few minutes moved out of the pentagon in order to go to their next position to create a new formation. As they proceeded, the passersby who had gathered around were no longer surrounding the performance but the performance was surrounding them. Sometimes beeing surprised that all of a sudden, there was a performer right behind them, thus putting them in the spotlight.
Rådhuspladsen has a constant flow of people walking through it and the performance was right on their path. When new passersby arrived at a time when the performers were most spread out, most didn’t realize right away that something was going on. They’d first see one sphere and perhaps thought it was just someone doing something silly on the square, but when they saw another one and then another one, they quickly realized that something was going on and they were in the middle of it. And instead of looking at just one part of the performance, they started looking at and seeing the whole. If they stayed a while, which many did, as the performers went from one formation to another, again closing in on one another, one could see that the performance had a definite structure. Personally, seeing the performers create a center and then moving away from that center, before re-creating the said center, made me think of tides.
As the performers were free to improvise within the structure, they created different metaphors. Metaphors for life and death, for relations between human beings. They each were in their own bubbles, but interacted. They were at times strong and at times, vulnerable, fragile and hurt. People laughed at times and perhaps touched at other times. There was something that was both funny and touching, and that is where I think that the power of the performance lied.