Interactive performance installations
SIGNA is an artistic partnership formed by Signa Sørensen and Arthur Köstler. Signa Sørensen (born 1975), performance-installation designer and performer. BA in art history, film and media studies. Also inspired by her past as a champagne girl and ‘private dancer’ on the Copenhagen night club scene. In 2004, she formed an artistic partnership with Arthur Köstler (born 1972 in Austria) Master of fine arts from the Royal Danish Art Academy.
Artistic profile
SIGNA creates a fascinatingly dark, glamorous, and decadent world, inhabited by characters who often raise more questions than they provide answers for. The works are living installations that constantly challenge the audience, which is forced to engage in the performance.
The work of SIGNA intersects with a diverse spectrum of pop-cultural forms of entertainment mixing stereotypical cinematic clichés with a bleak realism. It seeks to explore structures of power and degradation, fate, identity and desire.Often, the duo works together with a large number of performers, transforming an empty factory into round-the-clock hotel, setting up a camp of trailers in the middle of town, or taking over an abandoned Eastgerman prison.
Here, in the boundary between fiction and reality, mysticism permeates everything. Every object, every word seems to reflect a hidden truth beneath the surface. There are hints of secrets and stories: crimes, violence, murder, sexual experimentation and abuse.
A number of the performances of SIGNA take place non-stop over several days or weeks in which the audience comes and goes as it will. Some become so involved in the drama that they join in.
When SIGNA tours, the duo often collaborates with local performers, both professionals and amateurs.
Current productions
The company collaborates on international tours with local performers. The productions – except for Secret Girl – may be mounted in any language. As the works of SIGNA are highly site specific and based on improvisation the duo prefers to create new projects for each ocassion.
The Black Rose Trick
(2005)
The audience is invited to explore the many rooms and secrets of a strange hotel, which is under observation 24 hours a day by 16 cameras. Fifty performers inhabit the installation, working as chambermaids, nurses, soldiers, hustlers and stars. Times are hard and hearts corrupted and, in a web of crime and mystery, no one is innocent. Premiered in Malmö.
www.blackrosetrick.com
57 beds
(2004)
The audience moves past 57 occupied or deserted beds, placed in long rows. The staging revolves around a pile of crashed and burned out cars and a long table set up for a wedding banquet. The installation also features a cocktail bar, a roadside cafe, a border checkpoint, and a huge dancehall stage.
Originally performed by 42 artists. A smaller version was re-created in 2005 in Argentina with the participation of local performers.
www.57beds.dk
Secret Girl
(2004)
A woman is found drowned in a lake and brought back to life by two men, forming a violent and paranoid partnership. She seems to have no memories of her past life but also to have a strange and fatal knowledge. Through rituals and various explorations of her body, the men try to extract and decode her secrets.
Has been performed in an abandoned prison in the town of Meiningen in the former East Germany
Language: German
Night Finder I-III
(2003 – 2004)
A series of nomadic installation projects, set up in and around camping trailers. In a sort of modern cult site, the performers piece together through loosely-connected, improvised rituals their own personal magic. The work explores a variety of female stereotypes and guises: including a dead prostitute, an expectant bride, a murderess and a saint.
Twin Life I-IV
(2001 – 2003)
A series of performance installations, based on the story of Polish-born Nika Zabrisky and her twin sister. The audience follows the course of this mysterious, manipulative and self-promoting young woman’s illness, staged suicide, and resurrection.
www.twinlife.net
Review Extracts
"With her lavish theatrical journey, performance pioneer Signa Sørensen has created a spectacular paraphrase of theatre as a ritual. The entire building is in actuality a mega theatre stage. A depiction of theatre as entrenched from the outside world and an elitist cult. Was it not Aristotle who talked of theatre as a cleansing, a catharsis. And uniformity, this is the formative process around common human misery, which we are expected to take home. The most challenging aspect of ‘Seven Tales of Misery, is the contrast between controlled uninformativity and varied diversity."
Politiken (DK), Seven Tales of Misery
“Now it’s more of a sense of being brainwashed that creeps up on us – that’s how thoroughly well executed and convincing the performance in Signa Sørensen and Arthur Köstler’s total installation is. The old building provides a fantastic feeling of by-gone days with its faded wallpaper, worn-down staircases, grotty attic rooms and damp-stained basements. And the many performers, from princesses and beggars to the disciples themselves, fulfil their roles with an impressive combination of authentic reality and theatrical mystique."
Jyllandsposten (DK), Seven Tales of Misery
“The Black Rose Trick Hotel can be seen as a giant metaphor for the state of our contemporary culture. A place where disease and dark secrets in the basement can easily be avoided by ducking into the entertainment lounge to hear pleasant music and dream about a place over the rainbow. And like the mysterious hotel in the Eagles’ song, you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave”.
Copenhagen Post (DK), Black Rose Trick Hotel
“The young producer and performance artist Signa Sørensen has done it again with her new work, 57 Beds. She has created an arena that is at once magical and frightening in which the boundary between fiction and reality is dissolved, in which the barrier between audience and actor is broken down, and in which questions about boundaries and identities are raised.”
Berlingske Tidende (DK), 57 beds
"With Nika is Dead, Signa Sørensen has extended a work which more than everything else in the present radiates presence. It seems to tell us that if we do not steep ourselves in life, then life vanishes. Steeping ourselves is the demand, both in life and in that intense square that is art."
Politiken (DK), Nika is dead
"I do not hesitate in naming this the most exciting work of art I have seen for a long time. It is epistemologically new, and it induces curiosity, sensuality and giddiness... Not taking more of an interest in this project is punishing yourself."
Politiken (DK), Konwaliowa Cutie Doll
International Tours
2006
Freaks, Friends and Players (Bremen/DE)
2005
Festival de Mercosur (Cordoba/AR)
Site Specific Performance (Malmö/SE)
Teater Lilith (Malmö/SE)
2004
Nordic Exellence, (Göteborg/SE)
Malmö Festival (Malmö/SE)
Junge Hunde Festival – Das Meininger Theater (Meninger/DE)
