The Lamenters is an outdoor, site-responsive performance in which five performers explore crying as a collective, embodied practice.
Through intimate and physical rituals, each performer unfolds their own lament – a personal dirge translated into movement, where the body becomes a resonant space for transformation. Crying is not presented as complaint or weakness, but as an opening: a shared space where vulnerability is witnessed, amplified, and allowed to create new forms of connection.
Drawing on historical lament traditions, where song and ritual were used to express sorrow, longing, gratitude, and care, The Lamenters revitalises the genre as a physical and sensory language that reaches beyond words. Here, tears become a connective force between the individual and the collective, activating a shared bodily resonance between performers and audience.
Developed for the landscape at Sydhavnstippen, where vegetation grows through discarded building materials and the remains of human construction, the performance responds to each location as a living ritual. The environment mirrors the logic of crying itself: something unpredictable, uncontrollable, and transformative, breaking through what usually holds us together.
The Lamenters is a poetic and political ensemble work about witnessing one another in tears – and about the potential for change that emerges when we allow what is breaking through to be seen, shared, and carried together.
Artistic Team:
Concept and choreography: Antoinette Helbing
Performers: Max Wallmeier, Tomáš Janypka, Beck Heiberg, tba
Lament-coach: Tuomas Rounakari
Composer: Emil Vodder Kristensen
Costume Inbal Lieblich
Dramaturge: Mirko Guido
Production: Lenka Vořechovská
Supported by
The Danish Arts Council, Knud Højgaards Fond.
Co-Production Partners
Sydhavn Teater, Metropolis, PASSAGE Festival,
Performances
4.-6. September 2026 at Sydhavnstippen presented by Sydhavn Teater