SHINE UTOPIANS

Shine Utopians was the name of a fictional community, a performance, and a messy, queer festival, organised at Dansens Hus in Oslo in 2019 by Louis Schou-Hansen and Harald Beharie. Over five days, workshops, seminars, games, a concert, and screenings unfolded throughout the house, with each evening culminating in a one-and-a-half-hour performance. The performance received a nomination for the Norwegian Critics’ Prize for Performance of the Year in 2019/20.

About the performance

In Shine Utopians audiences enter the space as if they are guests visiting a strange community. Free to move around, they observe a group of performers inhabiting a somewhat deconstructed theater, slowly engaging in a series of weird intimacies, semiotic gestures, fights, and failed attempts at building human monuments. As if disoriented hormones have taken over the space, nothing ever stagnates into a form, but stays in a constant state of flux. Through this, Shine Utopians explores the potential of the theater as a plastic, temporary community, social disorientation and queerer ways of being together. The piece is performed by a group of 13 local, trained and un-trained performers.

The project was a slow, close collaboration between Harald Beharie, Louis Schou-Hansen, and Karoline Bakken Lund.