Folding, 1999
25 min. performance
Cardboard, tape, Stanley knife and sailor’s costume
Odense International Performancefestival
Denmark
Dressed up as a sailor, he enter the park, where people were gathered around a 7 x 10 meter big cardboard sheet, taped together of cardboard plates and boxes. He started to fold the sheet in different ways. In the beginning he said that it was not clear, what he was trying to achieve. He had trouble surveying the situation, because of the scale of "his paper". After a while though, it was getting clearer, that he was trying to fold a big paper boat or a paper hat. But the thick cardboard gave him some trouble. Normally, when you fold a paper boat, you just use your fingers. But here he had to use the weight of his whole body to fold the cardboard, which makes the folding physically demanding and less elegant, and he became more and more exhausted. Finally he actually manage to finish the boat, but then he had some problems with the structure of the cardboard, which became lose and floppy. That maked it even harder for him to transport the 50 kilo boat towards the river only 10 meters away. In order to make the transport easier, he tried to "wear" the hat, with the result of walking in the wrong direction. After 30 minutes of folding and transport he reached the river and launch the boat in the water. The boat could easily carry him, so he lay down, exhausted, until some people in a canoe came by and pick him up. This performance obviously also deals with a return to childhood. Apart from the actual play of folding paper boats, the scale of the boat made him look like a little child. The piece has a reference to H.C.Andersen as well. He was actually born in Odense, and in his fairy tale of the Little Tin soldier and The Ballerina, the Tin soldier is sailing in a paper boat.
