ENTER Festival: As If We Truly Met
Nikolaj Fondt Salzwedell, Eland Peeters Academie voor Theater en Dans – Mime
Language no problem, Muziektheater
ENTER Festival: As If We Truly Met
Nikolaj Fondt Salzwedell, Eland Peeters Academie voor Theater en Dans – Mime
Language no problem, Muziektheater
ENTER Festival: As If We Truly Met
Nikolaj Fondt Salzwedell, Eland Peeters Academie voor Theater en Dans – Mime
Language no problem, Muziektheater
“You smile at me. It’s your way of telling me that I’m yours, and that you would keep me with you for the rest of your life. No matter what I would do. We are close and can talk about everything. Even when I’m unfair, you still forgive me. I would sit there, right there, on your lap, and I would look into your eyes. Deeply concentrated. Heavy breathing.”
Two young men drift through life in a feverish dream, creating stories that aid them in their upbringing as a method to understand the experiences they encounter in life. By portraying roles of dominance, care, and passion, they learn the social codes of existence. They learn about love.
By playing with the space between fiction and reality, ‘As if We Truly Met’ actively displays tools of manipulation by drawing links between the fictional characters, between the director and performers, and between the performers and audience. In a spectacular moment of collision, these worlds merge together, compelling the audience to take an active position in how they relate to the presented narrative.
A recurring characteristic of Nikolaj Fondt Salzwedell's work is the deconstruction of the artwork experience: the audience is made actively aware of what they are experiencing, how they are being manipulated, and invited into participation. It is a call for transparency at a time when consumption culture seems to pull us apart from each other and ourselves. Stemming from an interdisciplinary background, Salzwedell stretches the nature of mediums and makes them bleed into each other, rethinking the possible frame of each work. Their practice is grounded in slow-burning, mythological and psychological complexity — speaking not to intellectual understanding, but to a subconscious, emotional or spiritual one, like experiencing a vague memory or a dream.
Salzwedell creates spaces to observe and move through discomfort as a form of collective repatterning. Durational mediums are central, as they hold the greatest potential for transformation: an encouragement to surrender oneself to a shift, expanding conscious engagement with life beyond the surface of human comprehension. This is further emphasised when the immersion of the work gets distorted, unveiling the layers beneath.
Over ENTER Festival
ENTER is hét landelijke (en ook een beetje voor België) afstudeerfestival van Ensemble Nieuwe Theaterwerkers. Een afstudeerfestival voor en door nieuwe theaterwerkers. Jaarlijks faciliteren we de ontmoeting van afstuderende theaterwerkers met elkaar, publiek en het werkveld. Elk jaar doen we dat op een andere locatie in het land, want het culturele veld kent geen centrum. In 2023 begonnen we in Amsterdam, in 2024 waren we in Den Haag, in 2025 was het de beurt aan Groningen en in 2026 strijken we neer in Utrecht!
ENTER is er om te voelen wie jouw lichting is en wat jullie kenmerkt. ENTER is er om elkaars werk, inspiraties en visie te ontmoeten. ENTER is er om een nieuw netwerk op te bouwen met mensen waar je misschien nog je leven lang mee zult werken. ENTER is er om een (eerste) ontmoeting met professionals uit het veld te organiseren. ENTER is er om je te laten voelen dat er een werkveld is dat wél op je zit te wachten. ENTER is er om samen met al je lichtingsgenoten je tijd op school knallend af te sluiten. ENTER is een afscheidsfeest en een housewarming in één.
