MOLTA | Dansehallerne

Roots, Rot, Riot

MOLTA is an immersive interdisciplinary installation and a live performance.

The artist Rósa Ómarsdóttir creates ecosystems which are transformed through natural processes. This ecosystem melts, leak, decomposes, grow, morphs and evaporates.

Molta means compost in Icelandic. Compost is a place for both decomposition and fertility, where obsolete and outmoded phenomena break down and new ones spring up.

In the work MOLTA Ómarsdóttir explores tentative and ever changing ecosystems. She explores the boundaries of man, environment and technology, where everything affects one another. Humans morph together with mushrooms, plastic particles and electrons. What new creatures, ideas, beings springs out of the compost?

During the opening hours of Dansehallerne visitors can freely walk around in the installation, dwell in it and interact with it. In the evening the exhibition transforms into a performance space. The four hour performance will take place in the installation on September 26 + 27 from 18:00-22.00 and September 28 from 14:00-18:00.

During the live performance the audience is invited to a dwell inside the installation for the duration of four hours. The audience is offered a place and time to experience ever-changing environment, roots, rot and riot. The performers activate the installation. They appear as sculptures, creatures, animals, nature or forces and are part of the ecosystem. The work explores an experience of transformation and time. Sometimes the changes are so slow that they are barely noticeable, while other times they are so fast that they are barely missed. The audience is invited to dwell, watch, listen, simply be, hang out, eat, drink and rest while the performers and the environment transform, they can look more, listen, sense, take a break and come back to a new space, that after about four hours has possibly become a part of themselves.

Food and drinks will be served during the performance, produced by chef Kjartan Óli Guðmundsson, where ecosystems, the environment and the performers themselves are part of the catering.

MOLTA was created in close collaboration with the entire artistic team.

About the choreographer: Rósa Ómarsdóttir is an award winning Icelandic choreographer. She studied at the Icelandic University of the Arts as well as P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels. Rósa’s artistic practice explores human and non-human encounters, in search for non-anthropocentric narratives. This ongoing research aims at finding a rich ecosystem that combines humans, objects and invisible forces. Her work, interdisciplinary by nature, weaves together interests in choreography, live sound-production, a feminist approach to dramaturgy incorporating vulnerability and flux. Rósa’s work has been presented in over 20 countries, at festivals and venues such as, Kunstencentrum Buda, Kaai Studios, Brakke Grond, Rosendal Theater, MDT Stockholm, Julidans, and Reykjavík Dance Festival to name just a few.

Reviews: “Most of us go to nature to experience calmness and timelessness (…) and the longer we stay, the further we step into ourselves. That’s how the choreography worked” …”Afterward, when the memory had compressed the time and the experience together, what remained was a memory of a well-executed and coherent dance piece that had reached not only the eyes and ears but all the senses” -Morgunblaðið, Sesselja Guðmundsdóttir, Jan 2024 “To me, the type of art where fixed frames are moved and even broken into pieces, promise an original and mind-blowing work of art. That kind of artwork is Molta.” …”the work broadened my mind and gave me freedom, joy and even the conviction that it is worth continuing to deal with being a living human-being despite what the hell is going on in the world” – Trausti Ólafsson, Víðsjá, Jan 2024