All-evening performance for five dancers

’It is winter. Just before the light returns. Silence. The frozen sea moans when broken. Animals appear on the ice between lazily rolling icebergs. Flowers sprout in the life-giving sun and melting ice. The birds return with spring. The drama of nature takes place before the polar night once again puts is dark grip on the country.

The man appears. Sleighs, dogs and catchings. The small human being fighting for warmth in the spectacular frozen nature. The fight of the blood against the ice takes its beginning. The exorcist seeks helping souls. A qivitoq dancer in the mountains. Mosquitoes dance everywhere. All living creatures hunt warmth from each other. Catchings fail to come. Winter of hunger! Frozen death. A tubilaq is brought to life and the exorcist revives the heart. And eventually, two old ladies remembering what all others have immensely forgotten.

There is nothing in the performance, which can be called authentic, or documentary compared to the Inuit tradition and culture.’Meget Kraftigt Glemt’ (Immensely forgotten) has been created from free associations and totally selfish interpretations of a body, a mythology and a saga marked by the very extreme conditions in the Arctic area. A tribute to the most beautiful land of the world.’
Thomas Eisenhardt, October 1996

Reviews

”In all its complicated simplicity the performance tells beautiful and mysterious stories of the white land very far north…. an evening with very much drive and originality in dance as well as in the way the story is told. Immensely forgotten? No, just the opposite!!”
Henrik Lyding, Jyllands-Posten, 5 October 1996.

” It is wonderful to see how much fantasy Eisenhardt uses to vary his long story and how congenially the dancers perform the story. Their physiques and abilities to perform trough their bodies are used with a considerable understanding of the expressive, and without boring formalism the dancers at any time are placed sensibly in the room. There are great choreographic skills at work in Immensely Forgotten, and there is a discrete humour, which is light and deep at the same time. If you want to find back to your belief in Danish dance theatre, Immensely Forgotten is the top performance of 1996.”
Charlotte Christensen, Information, 5 October 1996.

”And now Thomas Eisenhardt via the originality of movement in his Immensely Forgotten comes and brings us back to an originality which is immensely moving. And at the same time amusing.
… it is impressing that he never falls back to plain modern dance language just to fill in the gaps. He creates his own. Forcefully and searching.
Erik Aschengreen, Berlingske Tidende, 5 October 1996.