LIMINAL BEINGS (2026)

Premiere at Akademie Der Kunste Spreeklänge Festival Berlin 25.6.26.

By Kristine Tjøgersen (composer) and Ellen Jerstad (co-creator). With Colin Eccleston (visual team), Karin Hellqvist (violin), Jennifer Torrence (percussion), Lars A. Skoglund (performer)

The focus here is on “liminal beings”, on bats and mythological figures patrolling the borders, on how the world is perceived and on how this perception causes boundaries to shift and be shifted. The work also examines the lines separating the different genres of art and their distinctive forms of expression: thus, while musical theatre is regarded, classically speaking, as an intermedial work of art, the fundamental split between the senses of sight, hearing and touch – between sound, image and scene – is constitutive of the genre, whose structure is based on the way the human sense organs are configured.

In Liminal Beings, Norwegian composer and clarinettist Kristine Tjøgersen turns Rohrdammbrücke into a stage for an immersive piece of musical theatre in which art and nature, found and staged material, are woven together and related to one another in a perfectly structured composition.

This gives rise to a play of transitions and surprises poised on the threshold, brushing against and crossing boundaries, and making the liminal the subject of the compositional work in multiple respects.

This is radically challenged, however, by the manner in which bats perceive the world. These nocturnal animals “see with their ears”, while their eyes are virtually blind. Bats have a highly tuned, sonar-based sense of spatial orientation – in other words, they use acoustic signals in a range that lies at and beyond the limits of human hearing. However, they also communicate with each other in this frequency range by “singing” – using sounds and noises much as humans do. Back when bats’ reliance on echolocation was still uncharted territory, they were regarded as creatures from another world – as animals of the night, denizens of an unknown, uncanny realm, a world inhabited by ghosts and the spirits of the dead.

Crossing the threshold that leads there is a step into a realm that is essentially unknown, but it may also have one or two surprises in store. What is certain, though, is that this change of location is accompanied by a shift in the world and in our way of perceiving it. As Greek mythology knew only too well, when you are on your way somewhere, what matters is that you don’t turn around.

Ultimately, though, Liminal Beings is also a piece about the line separating art and nature, real and replica, reproduction and representation. It is about making audible what is inaudible, making palpable what people sense but ostensibly cannot grasp, and creating spaces for experience in which the ways we perceive the world can be handled in a playful manner that is full of surprises.

THE BATMASKS: I made these masks with upside-down glasses for the audience to expirence the underworld more clearly.