Such Stuff as We Are Made of – Kirsten Dehlholm, Billedstofteater and Hotel Pro Forma
Laura Luise Schultz · 2022
Since the 1970s Kirsten Dehlholm has been a leading figure in the performing arts in the Nordic countries. From her first mature work in the collectively organised company Billedstofteater (1977–1985) she has contributed to the development of what would later be recognised as postdramatic theatre in the performative tradition of the American neo-avant-garde and the early European theatre avant-gardes, which first revolted against the hegemony of plot-based drama within the Western tradition. Dehlholm placed herself in equal opposition to conventional institutional theatre and the political, left-wing theatre of the 1970s. Rather, she identified with the punk scene and the aesthetic turn of the early 1980s, including the phenomenological investigations into sense perception in performance art. Billedstofteater produced sensuous, site-specific performance installations that involved the audience in new ways in poetically transformed public and semi-public spaces. The poetic work was combined with a quasi-scientific interest in materials and textures and an almost anthropological or archaeological interest in basic human myths and figures. With the production company Hotel Pro Forma (active since 1986) Dehlholm professionalised her approach to site-specific performance and specifically embraced new lighting and sound technologies in an extended play with the audience’s sense perceptions. The productions of Hotel Pro Forma have experimented with the use of non-dramatic texts and acting styles and have consistently developed new performative formats in collaboration with artists from different fields, as well as with scholars and scientists. In Hotel Pro Forma, Dehlholm has fused an avant-garde rethinking of the theatre with an ambitious investigation of the most fundamental existential themes of life and death, love and war, and of scientific mysteries such as outer space, climate change and the physical laws and substances.