Curatorial Notes - Miriam Kongstad

Miriam Kongstad's HARD PLAY features at CHART in Copenhagen as more than a performance. It's an encounter, a proposition, and a live exploration of the tensions embedded in everyday gestures. Staged over two evenings during CHART, the piece creates a unique sense of occasion, inviting the audience not just to observe but to immerse themselves in an intensified atmosphere where play becomes stranger, sharper, and more psychologically charged. Beginning with the seemingly simple realm of childhood games, Kongstad unpacks deeper questions about identity, social conditioning, humiliation, control, and the unstable choreography of childhood as reframed through the lens of adult experience.

HARD PLAY (2024) destabilises the familiar. For Kongstad, children's games are not innocent relics of the past but early lessons in social norms, bodily discipline, and gender performance. The work starts within the recognisable framework of play but shifts emotionally between delight and discomfort, fantasy and fear, freedom and friction. Repetition lies at the heart of the piece, not as mere reinforcement but as a tool to expose how patterns learned in youth reverberate into adulthood. What is practised in childhood becomes muscle memory, and what is rehearsed early on returns as instinct, habit, and second nature.

Central to the performance is the braid, a 1.5-metre extension attached to the performer's hair, functioning as an added, limb-like form. Across cultures, hair carries profound symbolic weight, representing memory, wisdom, identity, and transformation. In HARD PLAY, the braid becomes a striking formal element, shifting through a series of charged associations: princess hair, dog leash, lasso, skipping rope, whip... Each transformation pushes the work further from a childhood pastime into a more volatile space, where power, submission, ritual, and control circulate through the body. At once playful and disciplinary, decorative and coercive, the braid resists settling into a single symbolic meaning.

This sense of instability extends into the soundscape, where live music doesn't merely accompany the choreography but actively shapes it. Music in HARD PLAY is not a backdrop; it's a dynamic partner as tangible and responsive as the body itself, contributing to the rhythm and emotional tone of the performance. Sound becomes a collaborator, a cue, and a second body in the space, influencing the timing and tension of the movement. Kongstad's role is both performer and choreographer, engaging in a live dialogue with musician Heva Vaupel, whose soundscape forms a kind of duet with the body on stage.

Kongstad's acute physical intelligence is evident throughout. Her broader practice spans performance, sculpture, image, text, and sound, but it continually returns to the body as a site where social codes are inscribed and unravelled. In HARD PLAY, the body is not portrayed as sovereign or seamless; it is exposed as something shaped by pressure, repetition, embarrassment, and transformation. Falling, in Kongstad's conceptual framework, becomes a shared condition, one that bridges childhood, adulthood, and social life, and is reimagined as a mode of inquiry. The act of descent signals a surrender of control while revealing the fragility of the sovereignty we strive to maintain. Instead of culminating in collapse, the performance lingers in the charged moment of suspension, where uncertainty is most acute.

This is where HARD PLAY resonates powerfully in the present moment. Kongstad links the choreography of play to a broader climate of instability: political uncertainty, social anxiety, shifting norms, and the growing awareness that the ground beneath us is far less stable than we once believed. The performance does not depict these conditions literally; instead, it distils them into form. Its movements are precise and fluid, its logic solid yet elusive, its energy focused and untamed. This tension imbues the work with its vitality. It feels meticulously composed without becoming rigid, allowing emotions to build without flattening into explanation.