Sweet Spot unfolds as a state of constant transformation, a collective body emerging, syncopating, leaking and dissolving. Taking the Norwegian term leikarring (play ring/folk circle dance) as a point of departure, a contorted chain dance spirals into a never ending whirlwind. Channeling the vagabond, the red shoes that never stop dancing and the legends of the fiddler that cannot stop playing, softly unhinged bodies slip between abandon and care, between eruption and suspension.
Drawing on the medieval image of the hellmouth as a porous threshold between life and death, the work expands into a restless terrain where opposing moods press against each other. Figures twist, sing and joyfully collapse together.
Moving beyond treating folk as a static idea and fixed cultural identity, the work inhabits traditional music through distortion. Here, Nordic folklore is bent, stretched, and disoriented and folk becomes a site of bodily negotiation and reimagination. A tender, alluring current where dances and fleeting fictions surface and submerge.
Sweet Spot is the last part of a trilogy of works which includes the solo piece Batty Bwoy (2022) playing with the fictions surrounding the queer body and the group work Undersang (2024) that takes shape as a collective ritual in the forest. Together, these works plunge into how the body can be a site of ambivalence. Where identity and power are constantly negotiated and mutating, unraveling a porous and unstable surface opening up for rituals, new ways of togetherness and uncanny play.
Beharie’s practice and choreographies often emerge in the tension between the everyday and the extreme, the banal and the sacred, playing with transformation as a continuous principle, for both the body and the spaces they move through. At the core lies a desire to challenge how we sense reality. Their works explore how queerness and the body can act as a medium and a site for revolt and dissolution.
For this work, they expand their continuous collaboration and research with visual artist Karoline Bakken Lund. Working together since 2017, they examine the poetic and physical possibilities of collapse, where objects, textures and bodies drift between support and obstruction, cultivating porous visual and social landscapes. In Sweet Spot they also collaborate for the first time with light designer Ingeborg Staxerud Olerud and composer and musician Ingvild Langgård.
*Leikarring – A leikarring is a traditional Norwegian chain dance where participants hold hands and move together in simple, rhythmic patterns, often accompanied by folk song or fiddle music.
*Hardanger fiddle – The Hardanger fiddle is a traditional Norwegian fiddle with extra resonating strings.
Biography
Harald Beharie(he/they) is a Norwegian-Jamaican performer and choreographer based in Oslo, Norway.
Beharie’s practice and choreographies often emerge in the tension between the everyday and the extreme, the banal and the sacred, playing with transformation as a continuous principle, for both the body and the spaces they move through. At the core lies a desire to challenge how we sense reality. Their works explore how queerness and the body can act as a medium and a site for revolt, ecstasy, and dissolution
They hold a special interest for the DIY and the vulnerability of being in the unknown.
Beharie is interested in how the body can function as a motor for dramaturgy, a force in itself that transforms through practice. In his works Batty Bwoy and Undersang, they explore how pleasure, excess, and monstrosity can become forces for empowerment and transformation while using the body as a site of ambivalence.
Haralds work has received nominations for the Norwegian Critics prize for the performances ” Shine Utopians” with Louis Schou (2020) and the solo work Batty Bwoy (2022). In 2023 Batty Bwoy also won the Hedda prize for “best dance production” and in 2024 the project “Undersang” won the Norwegian Critics prize 23/24.
