Wild Audiences (2020)

Wild Audiences is an artistic research project focusing on making theatre and performance works for non- human audiences. The project is interdisciplinary and multimedial in its approach, and was founded in 2019 by three artists: theatre director and writer Espen Hjort (Norway), actor and musician Mees Borgman (the Netherlands) and composer and sound artist Seán ó Dálaigh (Ireland). The project is fluid and has an indefinite timeframe.​

In 2020-2022, we collaborated with Het Huis Utrecht and Black Box teater (Oslo, Norway). The work is organized through the Skorpetind foundation, run by Espen Hjort. We are working with different experts and artists whenever the projects invites it, for example architect Tomas Hjort and curator / director Tormod Carlsen (both based in Oslo).

Wild Audiences was born from a need to work with ecology and to question the relationships between humans and non-humans. How can we create new relationships with non-humans? How can theatre and performance play a role in this? Can we ‘infect’ other humans with non-human ways of being?

The work departs from the idea that every non-human is different. We strive to work from a relation of equality with our nonhuman audiences, meaning that every process starts with an investigation of the specific sensory capabilities of the audience. How can we create an artistic, aesthetically interesting experience for a stone, a chicken, a human lung? Time, space and interaction happen in wildly other dimensions than human-to-human exchange when approached from a non-human point of view. The universe is full of non-human audiences and we hope to widen the spectrum of meaningful interactions with this practice.