In her first solo performance, dancer and choreographer Sarah Aviaja Hammeken, for her self-named dance company, AVIAJA Dance, explores the complexity of her own cultural background in both Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) and Denmark.

Half Danish, Half Greenlandic, Hammeken has a deep love of language and progressively learned many, on a needs must basis. Growing up in Denmark she was a native Danish speaker before mastering English (at school) Swedish and German (at dance school) and Italian (at work). And, of course, the language of dance. But to her shame, never the second half of her birthright – Kalaallisut (Greenlandic).

It’s a remarkable country Greenland, with its own language, culture and tiny population of 50,000, yet that self of identity pervades the island much more than it does here, in Scotland, where Gaelic is a minority language. In Greenland (under colonial Danish rule and under threat from you know who) 85% cling onto that sense of sovereignty.

This underpins Hammeken’s performance art/dance piece, because it’s her struggle with her sense of (half) belonging through language that drives the performance forward.

The dance element of the show is fascinating.  In a monochrome, stage right quarter light (it is very gloomy), we open on Hammeken lying prone in a circular pile of black soil.  Her in white. To a sonorous drone Hammeken moves in the way a fly does after you’ve zapped it with fly spray, the death throes all angular, erratic and unpredictable: but in reverse.  This isn’t the dying fly it’s the birthing fly and she gradually jerks her way from immobility to a chair on stage left where she glacially (of course) fully dresses in a cool white suit.  Very Copenhagen.

We even get a sense of music kicking in, but only after 20 minutes. From this point on dance and language intermingle.  It’s more movement really. But it’s absorbing, nuanced, micro-observational.

The soil of the birth inevitably becomes more and more pliable.  At one point a sort of causeway (like the bridge between Denmark and Sweden) is built by Hammeken and a new island is built from the soil. Only to be reconsidered.

The metaphor is intriguing. It feels like a furtherment of the notion of sovereignty, after all soil is the foundation of land, of communities, of insects and plants (as she tells us). Soil is a life force and this show is trying to capture that in all its Greenlandic splendour. The show climaxes with a discovery, a revelation, that is pleasing.  But maybe not if you are Mr Trump. Watch out Mr.

‘Soil‘ is at Assembly @ Dance Base – DB3