The Story of Sisters Hope

Manifesto
Sensuous Society
Contact

Sisters Hope is a highly acclaimed and award-winning Copenhagen-based performance group and movement spearheading a whole new way of performance artwork inspiring generations to come. Their work unfolds at the intersection of immersion, intervention, activism, research and pedagogy. In their large-scale durational performances they explore different aspects of what they call a Sensuous Society – A potential new world arising from the post-economical and ecological crisis. In their on-going groundbreaking 5-year performance, Sisters Hope Home, they are introducing a whole new artistic paradigm that they term ‘Inhabitation’ stimulating ecologic connectedness and sustainable futures. ‘Inhabitation’ was conceptualized in the PhD of co-founder and artistic director Gry Worre Hallberg: Sensuous Society – Carving the path towards a sustainable future through aesthetic inhabitation stimulating ecologic connectedness, 2021

Sisters Hope Home

Sisters Hope has also developed their own performance method – Sisters Performance Method – Sensuous Learning, which is the outset of the training of Sisters Hope’s performers and is now taught widely at art schools across the world and beyond.

Sisters Hope was co-founded by ‘The Sisters’ Gry Worre Hallberg and Anna Lawaetz in 2007. Today the group unfolds as an international troupe of performers and creatives from various backgrounds led by artistic director Gry Worre Hallberg and executive director Nikolaj Friis Rasmussen.

Sensuous Society Manifesto

THE END IS A NEW BEGINNING In 2008 the financial world cracked, leaving a gap for the new – For the new paradigm to emerge. We regard the crack as a major opportunity.

THE NEW PARADIGM We wish to take this opportunity and support the transition into the new, by living and breed ing in the cracks. From here we move.

THE SENSUOUS SOCIETY We will draw from the aesthetic dimension as a source of inspiration to inform the dawning world – We will call it: The Sensuous Society.

Why?

THE SENSUOUS SOCIETY As critical theory has pointed at the economic system has largely governed and dominated Western society since the industrialization, and rational thought has been roaming the tops of unnaturally constructed hierarchies of perception since the Enlightenment. Rational thought has been our dominating validating principle and economic premises such as efficiency, duty, and discipline have largely dominated everyday life in Western society. They have generally defined our institutions and offered themselves as primary modes of being and being together. However, the governance is not sustainable as the current ecological and economic crisis points at and it has lead to a fundamental de-enchantment of the life-world of modern (wo)man.

AESTHETIC INTERVENTIONS But its time has come. In opposition to the economic milestone stands the artistic or rather aesthetic. This mode is based on premises such as: phantasy, desire and not at least the sensuous experience of and engagement in the world. Artistic output is the quintessence of an ultimate aesthetic mode of being the world. The notion of a sensuous society reshapes the role of art and artistic practice. The exclusive autonomous art system is also a result of the dominance of the economic dimension. Within this autonomous zone the art genius is a celebrated figure, which is conceived as some one with a very special (transcending) intelligence. In a Sensuous Society however, we believe that this will be a more common intelligence – Simply, because we all have this creative potential within us, and if our outset and mode of being in the world is the sensuous, this potential will be released. The aesthetic mode of being and being together in the world is something we as humans always have and always will dive into. However, the current exclusiveness of this mode has created a collective longing in the Western world. Like an arm cut of we move forward in the ever-turning efficient wheels of society without noticing the blood floating from our armpits. We need to democratize the aesthetic mode of being to over come the longing and suffering that its general absence outside the art system creates. The aesthetic dimension will serve as a key source of inspiration in the Sensuous Society. Step by step those engaged in the movement toward the Sensuous Society will make interventions into the societal institutions. They will move from the crack and engage. Ultimately these actions will however not be encapsulated spaces allowing a sensuous mode of being in the world, but will constitute the primary mode itself.

POETIC REVOLUTION The road to the Sensuous society is carved with poetic revolution and poetic revolutionaries taking the necessary interventionist steps.

NO UTOPIA Sensuous Society is no utopia. Sensuous so ciety is a framework to explore the radical idea of the aesthetic dimension, the sensuous and the poetic as the highest values of society. What kind of society would that create?

How?

PERFORMANCE EXPERIMENTS We have no way of answering that question because we have not lived it. What we do have is the possibility to explore it through performance experiments. By putting our flesh to the idea. Embodying future visions to explore what it could be. While we explore we carve the path.

THE SCHOOL OF A SENSUOUS SOCIETY The performance experiment Sisters Academy is one such experiment. In Sisters Academy we embody the school of a sensuous society. Through immersive strategies we transform space as we take over the leadership of a series of Nordic upper secondary schools. Everything from classrooms, hallways and bathrooms is transformed physically through set-, light-, and sound-design. Your toilets will be pink, radiant or dark and filled with a low sound of humming or screams, the classrooms have turned into a forest, a ritual room, an ancient library, underneath the water, a fox cave and when you approach the leader of the school you will meet us embodying the unheimliche Sisters as head mistresses. Gazes exchanged. We will greet you in an office of untamed animals, sweet heavy deep drinks, stamps, type writers, fluid chocolate and gold, chains, unwritten letters, fur on top of fur, fur in piles, red carpets, dimmed light, an unseen boarder that you sense, that you penetrate. That you penetrate because you are invited to. We be come one. But two. But three. But many. A scent of times beyond time that will transcend your skin and tactilely touch you. Inspire you. Intervene you. Mirror you. Be you. Breath. The paradox of control and lush. The method is interactive. When you are at our school you are a student or a teacher or a guest of Sisters Academy and we and our staff will engage with you only from this simple premise. The logic of our world. Our poetic and sensuous world. Our school of a sensuous society. Our school where we explore new modes of sensuous knowledge creation, teaching, learning. When we change our educational system we change the lives of many. We reach our. The road to a Sensuous society is carved with poetic revolutionaries. Such are we as we reach. As we reach with kindreds in our movement. You leave your everyday persona to explore your potential poetic self while investigating how we can evoke and activate the senses to deepen the learning experience. We work interventionist as we intervene into everyday life contexts using art to argue the need for the aesthetic dimension to be an integrated part of everyday life – Not as something exclusive and autonomous. We transcend. We penetrate. With you.

SPACE CHANGING The changing of space is crucial. We immerse in spaces that allow us to navigate differently in the world. Like bodies swallowed by the sea will move dissimilar from upright legs walking the ground beneath our feet. Instinctively this body will adjust to the fluidity of the water. Try to survive. Take in breath. When we change space we liberate new potential. Instinctual.

SPACE CHANGE IMPACT Working with the idea of a sensuous society is working with a radical premise that changes the DNA of society and thereby everything. It is what you can do when you work with immersive performance art strategies by which we change space. You set up a uni verse and within this universe a new set of rules that we must all play by apply. The body immerses in this universe and eventual the tactic knowledge will manifest in the flesh and the ‘players’ or the participants of the universe might eventual act in this new way naturally. Instinctual.

NO UTOPIA REVISITED Sensuous Society is no utopia. There will most probably be winners and looser here as well. Who is going to lead – The most beautiful? The ones in touch with their senses? What will the trading system be? Something that allow you to be even more sensuous? Maybe when we are through a sensuous society we can begin to approach a more balanced state of being, that draw on all the previous states of society and truly connects heart, mind, body and spirit and creates sustainable trading systems between all members of society. Maybe we can go there already? We can ask these questions through immersive and intervening performance art practices in every day life contexts, as sites of experiments where we explore how to create a stage for the release of creative, expressive, poetic and sensuous energy as first steps to ward a more balanced and engaging world. Everyone becomes co-makers toward the new.

We will do this

MOVEMENT When you have a cause and create a vibration centered in a universe and manifested in events that in spire others, the world will move in an assured and desired direction.

Sensuous Society

The artistic practice of Sisters Hope is based on a vision of a future society – The Sensuous Society – where the sensuous and poetic form the starting point for all action and interaction. A society in which the sensuous and poetic are the governing and structuring principles – The premise on which everything is founded and grounded. What society would that create? Out of our current ecological and economic crises, a new society has emerged, a society that presents a fundamental shift in paradigm, a society which all of Sisters Hope’s work takes as their starting point.

Inhabitation

In their work Sisters Hope unfolds a high degree of audience participation, and they are in the process of unfolding a new level in audience development, which they have conceptualized as Inhabitation. This concept is central to their current artistic research. They move not only from a traditional perception of the audience as ‘spectators’ into the audience as ‘participants’, but explore the next level of audience involvement, in which the audience becomes ‘inhabitants’ of their art pieces and the sensuous universes they create – ‘To live inside the art’. This is one of the core investigations of the 5-year-durational performance piece Sisters Hope Home, in which everyone interested is invited to inhabit the sensuous and poetic with Sisters Hope – To become inhabitants of a Sensuous Society.

Sensuous Learning

Sensuous Learning is a new approach to learning and a method developed through the large-scale on-going project Sisters Academy. Sisters Academy is the school of a Sensuous Society. In the large-scale and celebrated format The Boarding School an art institution is transformed into a complete poetic boarding school positioned in The Sensuous Society. To participate the audience-participants will enroll as students at the school, where they will stay for a minimum of 24 hours. At enrollment, the students are given uniforms and they undergo an initiation ritual. Hereafter they will be part of the daily environment at the school and participate in sensuous learning rituals and performative exercises exploring more poetic premises for being and being together and learning.

In the Takeover format Sisters Hope takes over the leadership of and intervene in actual youth schools. The schedule continues even though we now inhabit the school of a Sensuous Society. At this school governed by aesthetic premises the collective question explored is: how would you teach if the aesthetic dimension, rather that the economic, was governing society, and if sensuous perception was valued as highly as the rational? Sensuous Learning is thereby co-created by the staff and teachers of the actual youth school, and the Sisters staff; it unfolds during the manifestations of Sisters Academy rather than being a well-described formula to be stringently followed.

Sensuous City

With Sensuous City the poetic layers of the city are explored through a series of sensuous journeys into different external cityscapes and lands. For 24 hours participants are exploring the city in groups. Perhaps they will follow the flow of the water through the city. Perhaps they will experience the city through traveling sounds or the darkness of the basements. During the 24 hours the city’s sensuous and poetic elements are explored and unfolded. What stories, atmospheres, movements, emotions lurk in the city? Participants engage as ‘citizens’ and perform active research, and they bring and keep their discoveries to be exhibited in the city after the walks.

Sensuous Governing

Sensuous Governing is an interventionist immersive performance format that Sisters Hope manifests in City Halls, Parliament Buildings and at other venues that represent societal governing structures of our society. With this manifestation, they create a beautiful and poetic intervention with the aim of awakening the sensuous and poetic, and they explore the participants, citizens, dreams for the society of the future. The format is an extension of our distinctive practice, which through artistic interventions addresses the role of poetic and aesthetic values ​​for society.

Sensuous Society (The World)

Sisters Hope have launched a strategic collaboration with The Danish Cultural Institute under the title Sensuous Society – Beyond Economic Rationality. The ambition is to take Sisters Hope and the project internationally and thereby unfold and explore their performance method and the concept of Sensuous Learning in a variety of different cultures. The project is also an exploration and investigation of common experiences and the change of attitudes after the pandemic around the world and not at least the planting of seeds for potential new and more sustainable approaches to life in a time where the ground is fertile for change.

Sisters Performance Method

Sisters Performance Method is central to the artistic practice of Sisters Hope.  The method have been developed and continuously refined by Gry Worre Hallberg through facilitation, direction, and experimentation with the larger group of Sisters Hope.

Central to Sisters Performance Method is ‘The Poetic Self’. The Poetic Self can be perceived as a methodology that provides access to inherent poetic potential which might not be unfolded in everyday life.  The Poetic Self can also be perceived as the self of a Sensuous Society. The Sisters Performance Method currently unfolds at three levels starting from The Poetic Self: The Poetic Self, Externalizing The Poetic Self and Relating from The Poetic Self. The method is the outset of the training of Sisters Hope’s performers and is now taught widely art schools and beyond across the world.

Sisters Hope sometimes offers available spots for volunteer engagement to performers with no or little performative experience or to performers who wants to expand their own performative practice through engagement with and by learning from the Sisters Performance Method.

The Archive

The Sisters Archive contains reflective material that has been donated by participants in Sisters Hope manifestations through the years. The importance of The Archive is to transport ‘data’ out while participants are immersed in the sensuous and poetic experience, thereby providing unique information about the aesthetic experience in situ. The Archive contributes to the movement towards a more Sensuous Society as these sensuous experiences and their value can be explored through this ‘in situ data’. All these experiences and expressions flow into a larger collective stream of reflections, dreams and impressions which is gathered physically at the analogue archive currently situated at Sisters Hope Home. The material of The Archive is open source and available to everyone wishing to use it for their research.

At the page The Archive you will get a small taste of the vast material that has been donated by participants in Sisters Hope manifestations through the years.

Archive Guidelines.

Contact

Sisters Hope

Charlottegårdsvej 1A
Baldersbrønde
2640 Hedehusene
Danmark

sistershope@sistershope.dk
+45 2624 7734

Sisters Hope receives funding from:

The Danish Arts Foundation (agreement)
Realdania
Nordic Culture Fund
Bikubenfonden
EU – Eramus+
Høje-Taastrup Municipality