There’s never enough time.

We spend our days trying to make the most of it, to stretch it and often stretch ourselves trying to fill it up but it never ceases to elude us. This 2022 edition of Oktoberdans – or the first five days of it, when our Springback group attended – felt like a tug of war between accepting our helplessness in the face of time and our inability to stop trying to gain control of it.

Watching Anne-Lise Le Gac’s La Caresse du Coma ft. YOLO and Daina Ashbee’s J’ai pleuré avec les chiens (TIME, CREATION, DESTRUCTION) had me reflecting on the ways in which we take refuge in ritualistic practices. They allow us to extract ourselves from time, and give us lofty goals of overcoming our past, starting anew and reclaiming our futures. But they’re messy, potentially disturbing and live in a place beyond our rational understanding. Harald Beharie’s Batty Bwoy, took some of these cleansing methods to the extreme. Without clothes, artifice and sometimes by literally beating up identities imposed on him, his character reveals their true self, hoping to make the most of what time is left.

Pieces like Carte Blanche’s MONUMENT 0.10: The Living Monument by Eszter Salamon and Mónica Calle’s Ensaio para uma cartografia felt like they were testing our – and their dancers’ – capacity to resist the crushing weight of time. In the first piece, the extreme slowness first offered itself like luxury not often granted us in our hyperstimulated lives, yet the work’s overall length and charged production dulled our attention. In a different way (but just about the same 2-hour lapse), Mónica Calle pushed her dancers to transcend exhaustion caused by repetitive moves and overfamiliar music to exist in a way that’s larger than the rhythmic and historic framework they were directed to follow.

But maybe escaping time and its markers is useless or detrimental. In her solo A Room by the Sea, Yeh Ming-Hwa presented a sort of biography of her artistic journey, acknowledging mentors for their experience and documenting what was left of them and of her past dancer‑selves within her now. 

Beyond the stage, we reflected on how slowing down allows for more agency. Two of our writers – Lydia Wharf and Lena Megyeri – were panellists during ‘Working Slow’, a seminar organised by Performing Criticism Globally, which revealed how the issue of slow time is essential to inclusion, diversity and accessibility in our sector.

But mostly time and legacy filled the air during this edition of Oktoberdans, as it was the last curated by Sven Åge Birkeland, founder-director of the festival’s parent organisation BIT Teatergarasjen, who passed away in July. On Saturday 21 October, no shows were scheduled, to allow for a day-long tribute to Birkeland, an influential figure who inspired respect and admiration throughout his 25-year career in Bergen. Special guests paid tribute alongside his daily collaborators and right hand people. It was an emotionally charged day of collective mourning/celebration; yet another group ritual to usher out the end of an era and help the festival, and quite possibly the performing arts world in Bergen, to move forward and welcome new beginnings.

That will include the tenure of the new director, Tang Fu Kuen (in post from November 2022), as well as big plans for BIT Teatergarasjen to move into a specially refurbished building, to house four performance spaces and expand its programme. 

Can’t wait to catch up then.