invite

We would warmly like to invite You to

Opening Doors- project’s performance at Iceland Academy of Arts/Drama Department, Sölvhólsgata 13, 24.4. 18:00

Opening Doors is a performance laboratory- concept, initiated by artist Maija Hirvanen (FIN). It’s currently worked at Iceland Academy of Arts, Reykjavik, Iceland as a part of Hirvanen’s 4- months NordScen/Nordic Resort- residency. The artists included are Árni Kristjánsson, Hannes Óli Ágústsson, Maija Hirvanen, Stefán Benedikt Vilhelmsson. Árni, Hannes and Sfefán are students at the Art Academy. After Reykjavik the project will continue (and change) in different places, next in Helsinki and Stockholm.

Opening Doors is led by ideas, observations and actions around the subject of doors. It's about the body's relation to architecture, history- and the present. It's about the social, poetical and imaginary functions of doors, the methaphors of entrance and exit, control and division. It's also about what each of the participants make it to be.

At the performance on 24.4., Árni, Hannes and Stefán will present their solos as part of Opening Doors. After the performance there will be a talk about the project and about doors. Before the performances Maija presents some work on video and talks about process- based art environments.

17:00 videos and talking by Maija
18:00 performances by Árni, Hannes and Stefán
19:00 talk about doors and Opening Doors

Contact Maija for more info maija@perceptionscore.net
tel. 6913732
http://openingdoorsreykjavik.blogspot.com

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About the performance on 24.4.2007:

Stefán
Benedikt Vilhelmsson says:

A TALE OF TWO DOORS.

If we go through it together we are likely to have a similar experience. Like if we both look at the same picture, our minds are
stimulated by the same source material. Every time we collectively experience something we can come to a (more or less) collective conclusion. Wouldn´t it be interesting to
have a whole room of people go through the same performance, and when
they come out, none of them experienced the same show? Then lets talk.

Hannes Óli Ágústsson says:

Mirror?
Door to the self.
A doorway?
Liminal space.
Hell?
Our own creation.
A door?
Our own perspective.

I’m a 2nd year acting student and have mainly been working with the concept of the gates of hell, and how we as human beings are creators of our own personal hell. I’ve been working with a variety of material, drawing both from classical literature (Dante, Shakespeare), popular culture (Wikipedia, R.E.M) and theoretical writing, mainly the works of french psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and its representation in the modern man.


Maija Hirvanen says:

When travelling in a warm country, one might notice this: the doors of the folk are open. You see inside peoples homes. There, the children are watching television, someone cooks, folds sheets.

Some other moment You put your tumb up and wait. It’s getting hotter and hotter, the air is waving above the black asfalt. The sand flies as the trucks pass by the road. You put your tumb up and hope to get there. Hallucinations in the heat, Willem Dafoe talks to you from far, small insects on shoulders. Water in the bottle is boiling. Then, a car. It stops. The door opens (and other stories).


Árni Kristjánsson says:

Sliding doors feel like a practical idea for the masses. You enter automaticly, no questions involved. I think some sliding doors should be considered unlucky…now, can a sliding door feel insecure? …the door constantly hides, still it is transparent, has nothing to show. When you get closer, it moves.

The door tried to do it’s job but it’s talent did not seem appropriate…

Attic Actions/At Homes

Written earlier: ' When travelling in a warm country, one might notice this: the doors of the folk are open. You see inside peoples homes. There, the children are watching television, someone cooks, folds sheets.'

Inside homes, people sometimes play performance artists. The walls are thick and it's too cold to keep the doors open. A home in Reykjavik, at the attic

'And all the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed, desired and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us, and precisely because the human being wants them to remain so. He knows instinctively that this space identified with his solitude is creative; that even when it is forever expunged from the present, when, henceforth, it is alien to all the promises of the future, even when we no longer have a garret, when the attic room is lost and gone, there remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic.'

Gaston Bachelard, 'The Poetics of Space'

Oh the writing in solitude, inside doors! Oh the collective attic!

10 days of Reykjavik left

It's 10 days left of Reykjavik and the mind is gathering something for now. So something about doors? Climsing at files, texts, images, notes- a door in Kirkenes, shot in June 2006, thinking of being in Reykjavik and of Opening Doors.

workshopping on Friday 23rd to prepare a work-in-progress- presentation at Prototype 108- event on Sunday 25th March. Quest observers to the work were Barbro Smeds and Kent Sjöström. things are starting to land on their places, in my opinion- in couple of hours presenting again at Skeifan- area of the city.

6th March Stefan gives a workshop within workshopping and takes the listener through a set of rooms- eyes closed, listening and imagining...

in the dark

workshopping on the 6th March:

Árni, recorder, dark room and a 1-1 performance situ.

Hannes workshopping on the 2nd March:

going around describing doored spaces, falling, reading texts from the Divine Comedy and Lacan. Perhaps he'll turn his supertheatrical playful skecth into Goth-style Slapstick show or perhaps a dark piece in a form of Ausdrucktanz. Let's see...

where next

and the talk on where to next...positioning of the feet...

Àrni reading text, only when people are silent...

presentation 1: Anna Thora

The first sketch-presentation of opening doors took place 23rd Feb 2007. Anna Thora and the mind map door, the door of paper, on a wall.

through the doors

The swimming hall dressing room doors; creating a hallway...

forgot the key

Some days ago, forgot the key of my appartment inside when leaving home. Waiting outside, ringing the door bell, the neighbour letting me in through the door downstairs all the way up to where they live. Perhaps I should tape the key somewhere. But the lucky co-insidence; if you don't have a key, someone else has and perhaps, rescue you inside. How nice! How convenient! I just stand there and wait for someone else to do the opening for me...NOT! But occationally, the unexpected openings are gifts.

doors in movement.

'do not lean on door'
'do not hold doors'

(excuse me, sir)

orienting towards the entrance of JFK

home door

I start calling a place home after sleeping there 2 nights.
The temporary home door in New York, 10th February.

Back to basics...

Remarkably interesting....

"A door is a generally floor-length opening in a wall (or other partition), often equipped with a hinged or sliding panel which can be moved to leave the opening accessible, or to close it more or less securely. Doors are nearly universal in structures of all kinds (especially houses and other buildings), allowing passage between inside and outside, or among internal rooms. Doors are also found in vehicles, cupboards, cages, etc.
The purpose of a door opening is:
to allow people, animals and objects to pass
for ventilation
The purpose of a door closure is:
preventing passage of infiltration air; reducing air drafts and creating an enclosed space that can be heated or cooled more effectively (revolving doors are especially efficient for this purpose)
privacy, and noise reduction
keeping occupants inside a vehicle
regulation of access, especially when combined with various types of locks
for aesthetics (e.g. cupboard doors cutting off view of the contents)
to help prevent the spread of fire
Doors and doorways can also appear in metaphorical or mystical situations; for example, a spiritualist might speak of "opening a door to the other world". Doors can have ritual purposes (one example concerns the doorkeeping duties of the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod).
The term door can refer either to the opening or to the movable panel or panels which closes it. The term doorway can be used to refer specifically to the opening. When framed in wood for snug fitting of a door, the doorway consists of two vertical jambs on either side, a lintel or head jamb at the top, and perhaps a threshold at the bottom. When a door has more than one movable panel, one of the panels may be called a leaf."

Taken from Wikipedia

"THROUGH me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me among the people lost for aye.
Justice the founder of my fabric mov'd:
To rear me was the task of power divine,
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure.
"All hope abandon ye who enter here."

‘We protect ourselves, we barricade ourselves in. Doors stop and separate. The doors breaks space in two, splits it, prevents osmosis, imposes a partition. On one side, me and my place, the private, the domestic (a space overfilled with my possessions: my bed, my carpet, my table, my typewriter, my books, my odd copies of the Nouvelle Revue Francaise); on the other side, other people, the world, the public, politics. You can’t simply let yourself slide from on into the other, can’t pass from one to the other, neither in one direction nor the other. You have to have the password, have to cross the threshold, have to show your credentials, have to communicate, just as the prisoner communicates with the worlds outside.’.

Georges Perec: ‘Species of Spaces and Other Pieces’, Doors

The other day I thought of this

When travelling in a warm country, one might notice this: the doors of the folk are open. You see inside peoples homes. There, the children are watching television, someone cooks, folds sheets.

Imagine this: we take an appartment block or a sky scraper and split it into two. It would be like a doll house from the childhood times. You see the whole setting, you place events in front of your eyes like in the open field. (We’ll some houses have been split, by lightnings, bombings, artists like...and serial divorces).

Standing in the doorway sometimes makes me feel Split. Don't let the gold in? Would you please open the door?

Doorway

The other day i saw a man standing in a doorway. The room before him was full of people dancing. I saw him come and he came alone...I saw him leave and he left alone. I never saw him dancing though, he just stood there watching. He had a sad face. He didn't seem like he was going to cry but his demeanor spelled out melancholy, and loneliness. He probably wanted to dance, why would he come if he didn't wan't to dance? But he never went in. He just stood there, maybe hoping for someone to ask him to dance, perhaps building up courage. But he never went in, he just stood there and watched. Maybe he liked to just, but I don't think so. Who comes to a ball just to watch?
When he left I felt sad as well. I don't know why, but he reminded me of myself. Except I probably wouldn't have come. Does that make me sad? Depends. Depends on me, I guess...

opening_doors_reykjavik