From Oslo, I travelled to Svalbard, where the “super ultra North of everything project”,

organised by Harald Fetveit of “dans for voksne”, was underway. This project at the

edge of perception was a very particular one because it did not follow the usual festivalevent-

culture concept but gave the artists the space to engage in serious work and

realms of experience. Five international musicians and a Norwegian performance

collective were invited to Svalbard. While the performance collective in Russian

Barentsburg experimented on a special life cream based on polar bear fat, and then

produced this on the spot and presented it, the five musicians had completely different

events to deliver. In addition to a prelude and a postlude in Oslo, the first part of the

project began in the abandoned mining town of Pyramiden. All five musicians (Jaap

Blonk, Kaffe Matthews, Roger Turner, John Hegre, Anla Courtis) gave approximately

half-hour solo concerts for no one in unusual venues in extremely cold temperatures.

This conceptual idea is nothing new; Terry Fox’ great sound performances in empty

churches, under highway bridges, etc. come to mind. To date, these have mainly been

one-off artistic concepts, and to my knowledge were not models developed by the

organisers.

This existential individual artistic experience combined with the collective necessity to

survive the extreme conditions (minus 25 degrees Celsius) determined the very special

energy of the two concert evenings scheduled at the end of the festival in Russian

Barentsburg, this time with a local audience that at times came out in large numbers as

well as three “official” visitors from Madrid, Bergen and Berlin. The participating

musicians – who had not played together up to that point, and probably would not have

in the near future – produced different combinations in these concerts, transmitting the

unusual spirit of the landscape and the preceding individual and collective experiences

into their musical interplay. Viewed sceptically by some participants at first, the only

criticism the participants later had of the idea and its realisation was the presence of a

video documentation team at each solo concert in Pyramiden. This view was backed by

the musicians during conversations. An inconspicuously mounted camera without an

operator would have been better for the solitary setting since, according to Harald

Fetveit, this documentation had not been intended for publication anyway.

I arranged a current information exchange on the respective plans with the festival

director, and one topic we discussed was his new project in the Norwegian seamen’s

churches scattered around the world. The spirit of this unusual festival can hardly be

transferred anywhere else, although we would like to try to jointly present the “super

ultra North of everything” formation in Berlin in 2010.