Oslo’s CODA Festival has long been committed to accessibility and inclusion, on and off the stage. Under new director Birgit Berndt, these terms are expanding – accessibility now includes cultural and class perspectives, and new collaborations highlight Indigenous and social dance practices while activating unexpected sites across and beyond Oslo. Audiences are invited to engage in many ways: sometimes seated, sometimes moving, sometimes plunged into full sensory darkness or discussing performances in small groups.
Several works stood out to me for how they turned matter into metaphor. Whether through sand, stone or institutional concrete, each revealed the human body in relation to the monumental – an interplay between persistence and fragility. Ingri Fiksdal’s poetic and raw Sand Flight, performed among vast sand dunes on the industrial site of Bjønndalen Bruk, and Mia Habib’s introspective Psychedelic Cave, unfolding in the darkness of an imagined cave inside Dansens Hus, both touch on the existential. Dana Michel’s MIKE, meanwhile, delivered a much-needed dose of institutional critique within the monumental Astrup Fearnley Museum. Between open-air dystopia and echoes of history, each in its own way opened space for reflection on our shared human responsibility. More than a spectator witnessing creations, I felt immersed and overwhelmed – in the best possible sense.
Sand Flight – dystopian landscapes and the scale of humanity
Although Nittedal is less than half an hour bus ride away from Oslo’s marbled Opera house, entering the area felt like stepping into a different world. Stark sunrays bounce off the metal scaffolding, leaving my staring eyes blinded for a moment, as towering mounds of sand create a sensation of being on a different planet, or the giant set of a sci-fi movie.
The concept, choreography and scenographic idea is developed by choreographer Ingri Fiksdal and theatre director Jonas Corell Petersen, co-created by dancers Sudesh Adhana and Pernille Holden, and had its world premiere in Toronto, Canada in June 2025. Today, however, is the Norwegian premiere of the work, at the industrial site of Bjønndalen Bruk, with an eight-strong dancer ensemble.
The first person entering the site, dressed in orange worker’s attire, could easily have been mistaken for a construction worker, if it wasn’t for his slow and determined walk towards the nearest sand mound. As he starts climbing, slowly, one by one, the cast appear, as if out of thin air, until eight figures populate the horizon, some near, some far, far away, creating an impressively rare visual depth. This simple widening of perspective opens up for thoughts on scale, not only in size, but also in time. As the dancing develops, the sand itself becomes a canvas onto which the dance is painted; the actions of crawling, climbing and sliding leave traces behind, only to be painted over by the next interaction.
Lasse Marhaug’s score, with Gaute Tønder’s choral sections, creates a vast, cinematic soundscape – though the speakers flatten its potential; a stronger sounds system paired with live singing would allow the music to breathe with the site. While the glitching adds to the dystopian undertone, the distance between sound and body at times makes the landscape feel observed rather than inhabited. As the music darkens and fractures, the electronic sound complements the dancers’ oil-mirror sunglasses, while fluorescent accents of their costumes flash against the scaffolding’s shadows, intensifying the sense of temporality. The physical laws of gravity and balance seem momentarily altered; I find myself reflecting that these towering dunes are, after all, composed of countless invisible grains of sand.
The dancers hold one another – sometimes supporting, sometimes pulling each other down. Through abstraction, the work opens reflections on existence and impermanence, on the thin borders between meaning and emptiness, labour and joy. They are as much workers as they are dancers – moving with pendulum-like precision, linking the pedestrian to the otherworldly as they wrestle, alternately with each other and with the dune itself. When slow sirens rise from the speakers, bodies have already buried themselves in sand, only to reawaken with tai chi–like calm. Later, the sound of machine-gun-like crackle is followed by an unexpected pile of embraces.
The scenes where the dancers hurl themselves off the edge of the dune are spectacular, and I catch myself wanting to run up there and join them in their craze. I’m moved. The performers reveal that the human body is both concrete and mortal, fragile yet relentless. I’m reminded that when our lives end, the sand will remain – and the sadness of that thought feels justified.
A work addressing climate change always risks falling into moral instruction, but Sand Flight avoids that trap through its skilful abstraction and finely composed choreography, carried by a remarkable cast. The theme is woven into the fabric of the work rather than declared from it. The work is a true exploration in which human struggle isn’t concealed but exposed – its gravity never sacrificed, even when joy enters the dance.
Psychedelic Cave – the topography of history written in our bodies
If Sand Flight looks towards the near future, Psychedelic Cave is an introspective journey through history. Inside Dansens Hus, Mia Habib and her all-female cast of co-creators are present in the foyer, instructing us to leave all our belongings behind, equipping us with a rock each – and a flashlight for emergency – before letting us in the room.
Being one of the first people to enter, I make sure to catch a quick overview. The audience chairs are all facing different directions, and I can feel my instincts taking over, as the awareness of stepping into 90 minutes of darkness guides me to choose a chair facing two doors: the entrance and the exit. Just in case of fright or– in my case – most likely flight.
The light is dimmed from low to pitch black, and I try to breathe deeply, in through my nose and out through my mouth. I remind myself it’s like a 90-minute meditation, no biggie. But damn, it takes me a while to relax into the situation. As my eyes grow familiar with the lack of input, my senses sharpen. The sound of several creatures breathing surrounds me. The five dancers have transformed into indistinct life forms – at first appearing from the invisible walls, later evolving into a pack of wolves. I can feel my brain starting to embrace the fantasy, as I let the reality of the room blend with the imagined cave. Animals turn into humans, the pain of evolution is ongoing, the reality of atrocities ever present.
In this imaginary cave, Habib invites us inward, tracing our own human history. In the bag I’d left behind in the next room is a copy of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. He describes how, in the big scheme of things, our human history is incredibly insignificant. Since we started populating the Earth about 2.5 million years ago, we have done unthinkable things to each other, we have exploited the earth, created a climate crisis. The time we find ourselves living in seems to be a culmination of bad choices and authoritarian politics, as we see the evolution of AI while rapidly losing the grip of our own humanity. Meanwhile, in the cave, I’m busy fighting against my tensing muscles whenever I feel something – someone – moving on the floor.
I have finally lost track of time. I’m letting my mind wander, letting time and space blend into an indistinguishable collage of present, past and future. This world is full of pain, but also pleasure; brutality, but also hope.
Towards the end, red lights starts appearing, scattered around the room. Later I learn that the dancers were carrying flashlights inside their mouths, but what I see are masks hovering in the darkness; faces of animals and people who have populated the earth, shining towards me, offering glimpses of imagined rituals from a time long gone.
I carry the memory of Mia Habib’s Samkome from last year’s CODA, standing in the freezing cold, my bare hand clasping my neighbour’s woolly mitten outside Kulturkirken Jakob. The two works feel related in their sense of co-creative embodiment. As an audience member you don’t only get immersed; by being present, you become a part of the work by default. Habib offers a parallel to the real world in the sense of sharpening our senses – of understanding that by being in the world you are not a spectator, you are a part of an unending whole.
This year, as the stranger’s hand was replaced by a stone clasped tightly, offering both comfort and sadness, I embraced the feeling of both holding and being held.
MIKE – playing with institutional power and art as work
In her striking work MIKE, choreographer Dana Michel leads the audience on a three-hour drift through her world, where everyday objects assume new identities and the very logic of the art gallery (here, the massive and luxurious Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo’s harbour) is turned inside out.
With humour and intelligence, she builds an ecosystem of gestures, tools and pauses in which meaning continually mutates. At one point, I find myself following Michel down a long corridor, acutely aware of my own and others’ embarrassment as she simply picks up a tool and turns back the way she came. The work questions not only labour but spectatorship itself: what are our roles here? When she hauls clothes rack after clothes rack up a narrow staircase, always on the verge of tripping in her socks, it becomes clear: she’s doing the work, and however absurd it gets, she remains the one in control. As Michel asks in the reflection that inspired MIKE: ‘If we cannot be ourselves at work, where we spend most of our lives – what kind of lives are we living?’
Curatorial ground and audience develpopment
Birgit Berndt’s first programme for CODA Festival offers space for resonance as much as for the works themselves. The schedule is dense, but never feels overcrowded. She demonstrates that accessibility can mean empowering the audience – letting art leak into places where it didn’t know it belonged, and letting places and spaces rewrite what art can mean.
While my review centres on works that explore scale, materiality and the existential, Berndt’s programme also widens the field through strong Indigenous and social dance presences – from hip-hop’s communal pulse to new dialogues with Sápmi and beyond. This larger curatorial weave deepens the sense of dance as a shared ground, resonating far beyond the festival week.
More than simply a dance festival, CODA becomes a space for reflection and exchange between artists and audiences, young and old, local and global. The festival’s new initiatives, such as the Audience Club facilitated by Anna Kozonina, echo the responsibility of facilitation itself: creating room for conversation, building knowledge and curiosity rather than merely consuming art. ●
9–19.10.25, Oslo, Norway