STRIAE

In English

“When everyone supports each other, everyone is lifted up.”

STRIAE is a performance installation that explores the interconnectedness of care and resistance through tensegrity structures and draws a parallel between our anatomy and protest barricades. In Tensegrity, the flexible network in which the isolated rigid elements are suspended provides the system's stability. Within social and political systems and protest movements, it is not only individual strength and rigidity that provide structure but also tenderness, flexibility and collective support.

Bjarte previously created the performance duet tens:ding [bending over backwards] about the dynamics between power and care and published Choreographing Sense: reflections on Movement as Sensemaking. In STRIAE he continues this research, now with a larger group of performers.

Inspired by protest barricades, community action, hypermobility, neurodivergence, queerness, and punk, this on-stage research combines physical theatre, dance, and circus elements with large-scale kinetic installations. Performers intertwine with tensegrity structures three to four meters high, balancing between tension and release, between support and letting go.

This is a construction-in-flux: a continuous negotiation between bodies and forces. It explores how chaos is not an opposite of order, but an alternative balance. How the collective and the individual can simultaneously elevate each other; How a body—like a society—becomes resilient through connections, not boundaries.

Care and resistance are not opposites. Care is fighting. Flexibility is strength. Our bodies can be the inspiration for a more equal society.

It takes a village to support a person.