PINK PAVILION 2022

TEATER GROB PRESENTS
PINK PAVILION
FESTIVAL
8.-10. JUNI 2022

Red Press, Copenhagen, 2022
Illustrations by Madam Neverstop.
ISBN: 978-87-94003-10-0
All rights reserved by Teater Grob.
www.grob.dk
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editorial
JESPER PEDERSEN
CURATOR & DRAMATURG
Welcome to
Pink Pavilion 2022
This year the writers
are from Finland, Haiti/
France, Israel/Germany
and Denmark. All the
written texts examine
how generations affect
each other and ask what
we are going to give
each other moving
forward.
This is new dramatic
texts that ask what kind
of values and systems
we want to pass on to
the generations ahead.
We hope that the
line-up will make you
laugh, listen. We hope
it will surprise you,
provoke you,
inspire you or at
least give you
some food for
thought.
Have a great festival.
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Why should I
care about future
generations,
what have
they ever
done for me?
- Groucho Marx
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GAPING HOLE
BY SALLA VIIKKA
Finnish playwright and graduate from
the Theater Academy of Finland,
Salla Viikka’s work is centered on
the themes of generational conflicts,
identity, boredom and breaking the
routine of daily life.
She shares that she was always
interested in storytelling, starting by
drawing and making comics, and later
moving on to sharing stories, moved
by the response of her audiences.
As influences Salla mentions that
animation movies, comics, Disney
cartoons and classic animation were
very influential in her early years due
to their slow rhythm, and later sci-fi and
fantasy due to the extraordinary having
room in ordinary situations.
This is a big theme in Gaping Hole,
where the boredom of ordinary life is
suddenly disrupted. “When I came to
the theater, after being a designer, I
thought theater was boring because
it was based on the classical and
ordinary. But in my writing for theater
I discovered the surprise element,
you cannot show different planets
so it gives room to the imagination.”
When asked about Gaping Hole’s
reason and purpose, Salla explains
that a play for three characters was
one of the goals that started the
process, minimalizing a production
and focusing on It won best Finnish
play in 2015 and is now presented as
part of Pink Pavilion festival. “An older
woman, bitter about the way her life
has turned out, using her whole life
in preserving the memory of a great
poet at the National Archive, finds
herself in competition with this new
intern in her early 20s disrupting the
peace, thinking maybe she can make
a doctorate about this poet... there’s
also a male character who is the boss,
maybe unable to see the difficulties this
woman has in this situation. She gets to
do passive-aggressive stuff to regain
territory, a fight over some really small
things, and it turns out very sci-fi, very
absurd, because a hole appears that
transports them to another universe”.
Playwright: Salla Viikka (FI)
Director: Helle Rossing
Performers: Tina Gylling Mortensen,
Maria Cordsen & Ernesto Piga Carbone
Translator: Birgita Bonde Hansen
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PHOTO : ANU NIEMINEN
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WOUNDS ARE
FOREVER
(Self-portrait as National Poet)
BY SIVAN BEN YISHAI
“National poet of whom, exactly?” Sivan asks. “The title
hints to this discourse of the Israeli, Palestinian, German
Bermuda triangle, where many valuable, important
discourses are sinking and disappearing. National poet
of whom, exactly?” she repeats. “In English you have no
name nor word for the place where one was born, holding
all the emotional aspects of what it means to have been
born in one place.”
PHOTO: CHRISTIAN KLEINER
Originally from Tel-Aviv and currently residing in Germany,
Theater Director and Playwright Sivan Ben Yishai has a
transnational story and a desire to find “the genome of
questions” through her writing. Originally focusing on
directing, it was a connection with writing once she allowed
her voice to manifest itself, becoming a prolific writer soon
after. Her plays have been shown at the Deutsches Theater
Berlin, Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin and Theater Lübeck,
among others. A fragment of Wounds Are Forever is
presented as part of Pink Pavilion Festival.
“In this play, I have a protagonist whom I call after my own
name, Sivan Ben Yishai, and she calls in her, as we do,
immigrants... holding several discourses in a way that could
throw a very interesting light into political and national
discourses that we are witnessing all the time, without
being intellectually exhausting. Being an immigrant is to
have all these perspectives and identities clashing and
colliding withing ourselves.”
Playwright: Sivan Ben Yishai (TY/ISR)
Director: Helle Rossing
Performers: Lila Nobel, Tina Gylling Mort
Maria Cordsen & Ernesto Piga Carbone
Translator: Mathias Raaby Ravn
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ensen,
Wounds are forever is a play that attempts to share these
fragments, these unions of parallel identities, touching
deeply on the subjects of shame, as a ride or meditation
on the 20th century from a Jewish, West-European
Perspective, leaning on huge, vast events of history and
jumping through time with this protagonist while switching
identities and roles to belong, to save memories and be
saved, holding all these pictures of histories in her body to
become ageless, positionless, an empty category, a map.
With this play, Sivan Ben Yishai explains that she wants to
check how history imprints us, how we are responsible for
the places we left behind, the discourses we left behind,
and what reminds behind in our body as active ingredients
that keep on working in us and designing and shaping the
stories we tell.
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THE BLOOD PACT
BY NIELS HENNING KRAG JENSBY
Niels Henning Krag Jensby is based
in Denmark, where he earned national
attention during the debut of his novel
Techno, released by Gyldendal in 2016,
and which later became a play. He explains
that he centers on the subjects of the gaysphere
and culture, and the connections
of the dynamics of violence, internally and
externally, physically and mentally, which
is created from not fitting into the majority
narratives, due to older generations’
trauma, creating negative cycles which
people are forced to process in order to
define their own identities.
A Danish novelist and playwright, Niels
Henning started a blog in the early ‘10s and
soon after joined the Academy of Creative
Writing, which allowed him to submerge
himself in literature, fundamentally
changing him and his perception with the
world.
PHOTO: JOAKIM ALMROTH
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“When you write literature you sit and think
and think, and theater is more about doing,
which I found like a good challenge” he
explains, when talking about writing this
play. “It’s a huge contrast but you also
have to think about the physical space,
the bodies, the people you have to write
instructions to, and this at the end becomes
art... what I find the most different is not the
final product, but an instruction manual to
how to make the final product”.
“I wanted to write about an important
author in post-war Japan who committed
seppuku, he had a private army of young
men and he tried to make a coup and
failed, so him and his best in command
also commited suicide. His character is
complex and problematic because he
was a nationalist, a fascist, but also a gay
man, a closeted gay man. I didn’t want
to idolize him nor his final act... So rather
than writing about him, I wrote about his
next-in-command, his journey and
fictionalized love story, which had wild
consequences. We meet him as he visits
the gravesite of his parents the day before
they’re supposed to commit this coup.”
Playwright: Niels Henning Krag Jensby (DA)
Director: Sargun Oshana
Performer: Lasse Steen Jensen
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OPÉRA POUSSIÉRE
BY JEAN D’AMERIQUE
“I am the testimony of the power of poetry” says
poet, novelist and playwright Jean D’Amerique,
speaking from Port-au-Prince, when asked about the
effect of writing in his life. The poet resides in Paris,
Brussels and Haiti, where he was born. “I started
listening to Hip-Hop when I was 12, fascinated by
this music which is poetry, and which gave me the
motivation to write because it was by young people
from neighborhoods like mine, rejecting society and
making poetry look like power, a way to have a voice
in this world. I quickly after made a lot of poetry and
books, and continued to follow this path to the point
where poetry is now essential in my life.”
Jean D’Amerique grew up in a country where social
and political violence were frequent, something
which greatly influenced the subjects of his writing.
“I didn’t need to look for subjects anywhere else,
I write about what concerns my life and the lives
of those who live around me. The poetry is from
my hood, from my bone and flesh, because I need
to talk about those who are rejected in society, to
give a voice to those don’t have one”. His latest
book, Atelier du silence, recently was awarded the
Heather-Dohoullau Price this 2022.
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Playwright: Jean d’Amerique (FR/HAI)
Director: Nina Rudawski
Performers: Lila Nobel & Lasse Steen Jensen
Translator: Lone Garde
Speaking on the play presented at this festival, he
explains that he based it on “a Haitian woman who
was a fighter, a revolutionary against colonialism
in Haiti, so I didn’t know that it could be relevant
for Copenhagen, but ok, it’s not just about Haitian
history, she’s an example for the world, by fighting
a specific violence when we were occupied by
France, but we didn’t learn about her life in school,
so I was really fascinated by her story once I started
researching her... so I wanted to take her from the
dust and share her story. Give her some light. She
comes back to life, a sort of ghost, asking us to give
her the place she deserves, even launching a social
media campaign to tell the world: I am here”.
PHOTO: JOAKIM ALMROTH
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PINK PAVILION
2021
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PINK PAVILION
2022
PHOTO: BIRK THOMASSEN
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CURATION: INTERGENERATIONAL SOLIDARITY
PINK PAVILION 2022
will present new writing
that provides a new
perspective on the topic
of sustainability, which we
call intergenerational
solidarity.
Never before has there
been a time in history
where our actions and
decisions had such
monumental
consequences for future
societies as they do
now. We aim to present
new writing that asks
What ideas do we wish to
pass on to these coming
generations? What values
do we want to dismantle
here and now, in order
to cease their negative
impact in the future?
Our hope is that
by presenting a rich and
diverse program
of artists and genres
under the banner
of intergenerational
solidarity and
sustainability,
perhaps we can
see the beginning of
a new aesthetics and
ethics in theatre,
whichpurposely touches
emotional fibers
in the audience, creating
connections between
the well being of present
generations and the
reflections in the ones to
come.
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All the interviews collected on this booklet
are contained as full episodes of the Red
Transmissions Podcast as a collaboration
with Teater Grob. Listen to them on most podcast
providers or visit www.redtransmissions.libsyn.com
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For more information go to www.grob.dk