Take part in an outdoor performance

In August 2023, LIMINAL will premiere two original, audience-engaging, audio works, or as we call it: “audio events”, respectively in Ørstedsparken and the Kings Garden in central Copenhagen.
One work is created by LIMINAL/Erik Pold for the Kings Garden and the other is created by Sarah Thom and Simon Will from the Berlin-based, international arts collective Gob Squad, considered to be one of the leading performing arts companies in Europe.

The audio events are a mixture of flash mob meets guided tour, in which audiences are invited to participate in being guided around parks and fulfill particular tasks. The experience will be active, political, critical, entertaining and surprising.
Come and join us as we explore two parks in the center of Copenhagen and discover what they have in store for us in terms of history and possibilities.

PARKLIFE 1 – THE KING’S GARDEN:
THE LION

By Erik Pold / LIMINAL

Lions, gods, powerplay and nonbinary fairytales. LIMINAL directs us in a straight line into The King’s Garden. Here, nature is under control, beautiful straight avenues and trimmed flower beds are strictly and symmetrically disciplined, and visitors are normally expected to be well behaved, while they feel themselves wrapped in the presence of history, greeted by kings, queens, princesses and princes in the middle of neat flower beds and sculptures that elevate man over nature. But as we proceed, we slowly realise that the presence of history has lost some momentum over time.

Which forms of power do we accept today? Royal power is beginning to seem a bit like a fanciful decorative construction, a folly garden. Let’s move away from the usual straight paths of the park and challenge its hierarchy. In THE LION, the princess is non-binary and we may have to fight dragons, lions and our own ego.

Duration: 40 minutes.

PARKLIFE 2 – ØRSTEDSPARKEN
This is not a line, but part of a very large circle

By Sarah Thom and Simon Will / Gob Squad

“Urban living has always tended to produce a sentimental view of nature. Nature is thought of as a garden, or a view framed by a window, or as an arena of freedom”.
The White Bird, by John Berger

The park, and parklife has given us city folks a quaint view of nature. We prefer it in a frame, landscaped and aesthetically pleasing and at the service of our need to escape the urban grind and concrete. Perhaps we once believed that if we surrounded ourselves by a Garden of Eden, we would ourselves become pure and innocent as the founders of humanity we believed in.

Gob Squad will lead you into the picturesque idyllic setting of Ørstedsparken
Which melts from the city into the park landscape. In this charming landscape, clues will reveal themselves and speak to us about the more chaotic, fearsome and unbridled sides of nature and humanity in which our desires do not conform to the ideal standards of beauty and the common good but rather splurge between attraction and repulsion, between uncertainty and fleeting encounters. 
The audio walk will be fun and playful, but also dive you into a world of surprises and secrets, of longing, encounters and departures.

The title references a piece from Yoko Ono and speaks of life cycles and the perception of seeing only a small part of something gigantic and greater than us.

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PARKLIFE is both investigative performing arts and a unique and fun experience for Copenhageners and tourists in the city.