Folding
1999
25 min. performance
Cardboard, tape, Stanley knife and sailor’s costume
Odense International Performancefestival, Denmark

Dressed up as a sailor, I enter the park, where people are gathered around a 7 x 10 meter big cardboard sheet, taped together of cardboard plates and boxes. I start to fold the sheet in different ways. In the beginning it is not clear, what I am trying to achieve. I have trouble surveying the situation, because of the scale of "my paper". After a while though, it is getting clearer, that I am trying to fold a big paper boat or a paper hat. But the thick cardboard gives me some trouble. Normally, when you fold a paper boat, you just use your fingers. But here I have to use the weight of my whole body to fold the cardboard, which makes the folding physically demanding and less elegant, and I become more and more exhausted. Finally I actually manage to finish the boat, but then I have some problems with the structure of the cardboard, which becomes lose and floppy. That makes is even harder for me to transport the 50 kilo boat towards the river only 10 meters away. In order to make the transport easier, I try to "wear" the hat, with the result of me walking in the wrong direction. After 30 minutes of folding and transport I reach the river and launch the boat in the water. The boat can easily carry me, so I lay down, exhausted, until some people in a canoe comes by and pick me 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 me 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.