Moving a memory is a performance and an exhibition created for a gymnasium. Convoi Exceptionnel explores experiences and memories connected to this space which most of us have a relationship with. The smell of lacquered floor, thick rope, and wooden rib walls. Scheduled exercise activating a wide range of emotions. The gymnasium is charged with fear and joy. A place in the past and present. Stage director and set designer Jon R. Skulberg says: ‘You walk into the gymnasium, sense your feet on the floor. The marked floor lines reveal a regime of movement. Now it’s your chance redefine the hierarchy and explore a new kind of poetry.’

The Nordic gymnasium is a symbol of the fit body, disciplined and trained to obtain a good health. An architectural manifestation of public health. We challenge the space’s authority and give it another language. It’s an invitation to move your memory.

The arc of the work is drawn up by Convoi Exceptionnel, visual artist Maiken Bent, choreographer and dancer Wayson Poon, composer and musician Paul Yip in collaboration with Jon R. Skulberg.

For Ever Four Seasons” is a musical, choreographic and existentialist work which insists on slowness, as an act of resistance against our rapidly accelerating world.
At one and the same time, Jon R. Skulberg and Convoi Exceptionnel want to give the audience a sensuous experience, which both pleases and disturbs while posing the fundamental question: What is the role of mankind in the Anthropocene era?

The first dancer, Kenzo Kusuda, has freed himself of the patterns of human motion to create the basic form of “nature”. The second dancer, Marianna Kavallieratos, is a figure wandering in a probable and violent vision of the future – in an impossible attempt to build a relationship with the outside world and a “nature” which no longer bears any resemblance to itself.

The two dancer’s conditions and emotional states are anchored to the newly composed works by the cello duo Soma & Lil and composer and sound artist Kristian Hverring. Jon R. Skulberg’s staging, scenography and light invite the audience to a series of images of presence in slow but constant change.

Human beings have developed, and survived as a species due to the ability to cooperate and develop mental structures and systems. For instance, technology, philosophy, and art. At the same time they have created: concentration camps, weapons, and nuclear power.

In recent years, both art and philosophy have reflected on the fact that the man has become a similar geological force to volcanoes, rivers, and displacement of tectonic plates. For the first time in history, a majority of us lives in urban man-made landscapes rather than rural areas. Mankind has detached itself from nature. Is it because we no longer regard ourselves as part of it? The work For Ever Four Seasons investigates what value the term “nature” has today. Perhaps the idea of separation between the man and nature should be reconsidered?

The development of this work is influenced by a Nobel Prize winning writer Svetlana Aleksijevitj’s reflections and interviews with survivors of Chernobyl. Aleksijevitj uses the Chernobyl disaster as a potential picture of the future, and let the witnesses remember in a world that will forget. Her analysis is a hyper-concrete example that poses ethical, moral and metaphysical questions to the modern human. With nuclear technology, we have also gained an instrument so that we can act on the same scale as nature. A man-made natural power.

What is the role of humanity in the geological period we are in now, the Anthropocene age? Convoi Exceptionnel gives space and form for an artistic explanation to the questions above.