SOLASTALGIA

a dogma terra performance

Article by Madeleine Kate McGowan
The NXT Magazine: Transformations of Care

This movement roots itself in the planetary
boundaries not as restrictions, but as contours
that unleash originality – an art of necessity
that turns limits into original expression.

With a trembling step and a warm singing voice, I guided the audience members who had come to experience our three-hour-long cli-fi choir piece, Solastalgia¹, at Sydhavnstippen, Copenhagen – an old dumping ground now transformed into feral landscapes, with a diverse representation of trees, grasses, sheep, alpacas, and foxes. But also with gravel jutting out everywhere, and urban debris from centuries of city renewal processes.

The sun was 45 minutes from setting that evening, which meant the light stroked the grass in a way that animated long shadows and brought out rose-red nuances everywhere. In the soundscape, there were gunshots from the adjacent shooting range. I told the audience that the sounds of bullets were from ongoing wars at the borderlands, and that they should be careful and stay close. The fiction had been initiated.

Solastalgia is a very personal theatre production to me. It took years to shape, through hours of reading, sensing, drawing, walking, singing, and through long dialogues with, among others, Croatian philosopher Srećko Horvat and scenographer and architect, Tibetan/Danish Dicki Lakha. It is a speculative, site-responsive performance, where audiences, through a sequence of vocal tableaux, engage with a nomadic chorus of mourners enacting rituals of lament, releasing grief into the terrain through song and embodied gesture. The work stages an inquiry into ecological loss and longing under conditions of climate crisis, generating an intensified encounter between body, voice, and landscape. Simultaneously, Solastalgia activated regenerative practices in collaboration with local ecological stewards, entangling artistic fiction with biological processes and situating performance within the continuum of environmental care.

And this is where the central exploration of this article roots itself – the production of theatre as a potential regenerative force. I wanted the scenography, choreography, and general form to be shaped from the planetary boundaries; playing with the idea of turning these limitations into an original aesthetic expression. Herein lies a key to unfolding a movement that finds its expression in the green ethics of our time.

For art has a way of flourishing in the presence of limitations. Whether born of scarcity, discipline, or survival, some of the most radical artistic breakthroughs emerged not from abundance, but from constraint. This is the paradox at the heart of what I call dogma terra: when boundaries become the condition for new expressions.

Throughout art history, there are numerous examples of sufficiency becoming a source for artistic abundance. The conscious choice of painting with the less capable hand. The restriction of only having one color. The curious mind that keeps asking what if…

The story repeats across history. In the aftermath of the First World War, the Bauhaus was born in an era of economic hardship and material shortages. Instead of luxury, the school turned toward essentials: pure geometry, functional forms, the radical simplicity that would shape modern design. Out of rubble rose a new vision of how art could be lived.

And after the devastation of the Second World War, Italian filmmakers were left with little: no grand studios, no elaborate budgets, no stars to glamourize the screen. Out of necessity, they turned to the streets. With handheld cameras, natural light, and non-professional actors, films like Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945) and Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) captured the raw texture of daily life in a broken country. Their limitations became their strengths: the grain of the film stock, the awkwardness of untrained actors, the rough edges of location sound – all infused cinema with authenticity and poignancy. Constraint itself gave rise to a new aesthetic language, one that spoke not in spectacle but in truth.

In 1940s New York, Maya Deren created films with almost no resources. Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) was shot largely in her own home, with her friends as actors, and a 16mm camera borrowed on credit. What might have seemed like limitation became an opening into the subconscious. Her minimal props – a key, a knife, a mirror – repeated through looping sequences, generated a surreal language that redefined experimental cinema. Deren proved that sufficiency is not only about survival, but about focus: the courage to work with what is at hand, to strip away until only the essentials remain, and from them conjure entire dream worlds.

In the 1990s, Dogme 95 set the film world ablaze with its “Vow of Chastity.” By renouncing artificial lighting, soundtracks, and special effects, a group of Danish filmmakers found a raw new language for cinema. The refusal itself became fertile ground for invention. The stripped-down frame opened space for intensity, intimacy, and a vibrant cinematographic style.

Further, there are rich examples from the Middle East where an “aesthetics of sufficiency” has been central for centuries. Beauty was cultivated not through excess, but through restraint, repetition, modest materials, and careful attention to limits – whether spiritual, political, or material. In Islamic art, the prohibition of figural representation did not stifle expression; it redirected it. Out of this ethical boundary emerged an infinite world of geometry and calligraphy. Simple lines, repeated and varied, spiraled into patterns that suggested the endlessness of the divine. Limitation became a portal into infinity.

In Persian miniature painting, entire cosmologies unfolded within the confines of a palm-sized page. With modest pigments and the discipline of scale, artists condensed epic narratives into jewel-like worlds of astonishing richness. Here, sufficiency was not a compromise but an art of concentration, where smallness became vastness. For nomadic peoples in the deserts of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, survival shaped form. Tents and textiles woven from goat hair and wool were both shelter and story, coded with patterns that carried memory, identity, and protection. In these works, necessity became the ground for cultural expression; portable beauty woven from what was at hand.

To practice sufficiency, then, is not to resign oneself to less, but to discover the surplus hidden inside the frame of necessity. It is to reimagine boundaries as openings, to experience freedom through restriction, to accept conditions as collaborators. Austerity becomes play. Scarcity becomes form. Today, as the planet itself places limits before us, we might look again to this lineage. What new poetics can emerge when architecture, design, and art lean into sufficiency? What if the green ethics of our time – reuse, restraint, regeneration – were not only moral imperatives, but aesthetic opportunities? Are we seeing a new movement we might call Dogma Terra?

Dogma terra reminds us that life does not thrive through excess, but through attunement. Beauty is not the infinite expansion of means, but the precise calibration of what is enough.

In the creation of Solastalgia, I rooted the whole team in dogma terra. So we asked ourselves: what if we use no electricity? What if we take the performance out of the black box and into a landscape? What if we shape everything from recycled materials? How would these limitations, rooted in planetary boundaries, shape the piece?

Taking the production out of the black box meant that the landscape of Sydhavnstippen would become the defining scenography of the piece – albeit an unpredictable scenography. All kinds of weather would engage us and our audiences, which occupied many hours of discussion within the production team. Unfolding a theatre piece within a living scenery holds many challenges. So, we chose to let the sun be the light designer. Beginning the piece one hour before sunset created a dramatic shift in the gradients of the landscape, as the audience moved from the rosy dusk into pitch darkness. Here we activated headlamps on each performer, which could be turned on one hour into the fiction, animating whatever we chose to direct them toward – referencing horror film aesthetics and prepping fashion. Costumes were decorated with materials that reflected the headlamp light, adding another visual dimension. The nomadic camp into which audiences were guided was shaped from circular materials such as reused linen from hospitals and commercial banners from city construction scaffolds. The costumes were re-sewn from secondhand clothing, creating a very specific look shaped by costume-designer Anna Hanghøj Iversen.

Our lack of microphones meant that our singing voices could easily be lost into thin air, so I invited Polish composer and vocalist Paulina Miu to train us in ancient European landscape-calling techniques, which radically shaped the sonic aesthetics of the choir piece. Losing the whispers a microphone can make possible, and instead introducing clear, loud and sometimes dissonant choir sequences. Working in a vast landscape also allowed us to play with spaciousness and depth in the soundscape by positioning vocalists in different locations, hereby shaping the layers of sound.

We performed Solastalgia for almost two full months. Every evening we welcomed 50 audience members and immersed them in the fictional world of Solastalgia, and this singing nomadic group of women. We would walk the same route each night, which attuned us to the landscape, and slowly, the landscape engaged with us. By the final performances, the alpacas would often join the set in the last hour, provoking gasps from the audience when our star performers began taking dust baths, their red eyes glowing in the glare of our headlamps.

It was a dramatic production. A tough birth. Moving out of comfortable structures is inevitably demanding. But on some nights it became the most magical symphony I could ever have imagined. A dogma terra performance.

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MADELEINE KATE MCGOWAN