Sort/Hvid
Join the herd queueing up for the theatre trough. Here we fatten you up, massage your body, put sweet music in your trustful ears.
And then: a bullet to the forehead or a squirt of blood from the throat, conventional, of course, or full halal. We drip off, we hang for curing, we cut up, we zealously wrap. At the expiry date the product is dipped in tar and rolled in feathers, before submerged in boiling oil.
From a grey soup, a living creature rises: a body put together of foreign limbs; hooves of goat, wings of rotten fowl, the horns growing from the forehead of the creature. Flex your six tentacles, stretch your crooked legs, look through your new eight sparkling eyes.
Sort/Hvid [Black/White] is a stage in an old slaughterhouse in the meat packing district of Copenhagen. Here art, music and body transform reality. Come and be a part of the mutation.
Profile
Sort/Hvid [Black/White] is one of Copenhagen’s most agenda-setting theatres. Sort/Hvid creates art that examines current social and political issues across genre and form. Through collaborations with artists, performers, researchers, theatres, festivals and art institutions both in Denmark and abroad, we toss and turn current issues in the public debate in the pursuit of expanding the public consciousness.
In 2020 The Danish Arts Council selected Sort/Hvid to be a scene for music theatre development from 2021 till 2024, and since prolonged untill 2029. In this period, Sort/Hvid will be the center of music performances across genres and form that seek to develop the understanding of and the conditions for music theatre. Read more here.
Sort/Hvid’s political art is produced in a newly renovated slaughterhouse in the Meatpacking District of Copenhagen with collaborators ranging from independent performing arts groups to established public arts institutions. Through collaborations with Aarhus Teater, The Royal Danish Theatre and Teater Momentum, Sort/Hvid gains a much wider outreach than our size allows. With Aarhus Teater, this has been evident in our staging of the Hoblerg classic ERASMUS MONTANUS, and in LIVING DEAD, a zombie horror on the refugee crisis. With The Danish Royal Theatre, we have created the war ballet IN CONTACT and UROPA with the Royal Ballet have shown. At festivals, we experiment with other forms of expression – like opera in our staging of Mozart’s DON JUAN in a horny nightclub version during CPH Opera Festival. Through collaborations with art centres Overgaden and Kunsthal Aarhus, we incorporate contemporary art in our work, often seeking to expand the theatre’s practices. Examples include the memorial WE ARE NOT REAL, the performative exhibition MARTYR MUSEUM and the satirical-political performance movement THE PUPPET PARTY.
Our works always try to challenge political agendas, and with heavily debated stagings such as the race war in BLACK MADONNA with Madame Nielsen and the examination of the mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik in MANIFEST 2083, Sort/Hvid has shown that theatre can extend its range from the cultural section to the wider public debate.
At our location in the Meatpacking district we have about 7000-9000 audiences per year, where Sort/Hvid’s total audience on own and other stages in the country adds up to 15-20,000 annually. The audience is wide ranging in age, and 40 percent of our audience in the Meatpacking District is under 30 years of age.
Sort/Hvid is managed by scenographer and director Nathalie Mellbye, who took over the theatre in 2023 from Christian Lollike. The theatre was founded in 1972 under the name CaféTeatret. In 2014, CaféTeatret changed its name to Sort/Hvid. Just half a year later, the historic theatre in Skindergade burned down. In the spring of 2017, we opened our new theatre in Staldgade in the Meatpacking District with the support of the City of Copenhagen, private foundations and almost 400 private followers who backed our crowdfunding campaign. Here, Sort/Hvid is housed today.
Music Theatre of the Future
VISION
Sort/Hvid wants to create music theatre that confronts our world.
We will not let ourselves be limited by conventions; we will unite the diversity of artists from different disciplines in creating the future of music theatre. We want to create new expressions, make new genres, and dissolve them again. The audience can expect everything from activistic opera to political pop, from death metal puppet theatre to cacophonous chamber music.
We dream of projects that are sensuously captivating and groundbreaking, both performatively and visually. Where music, body, space and concept challenge traditional narratives and frozen formats.
As a hub for music theatre Sort/Hvid will be producing ambitious performances and facilitating experiments, residencies, workshops, and knowledge exchange. We want to create a professional, development orientated meeting place for those who want to take music theatre in new directions, both musically and performatively. We are going to collaborate with music and stage art producers both locally and internationally – artists, orchestras, festivals, organizations, and networks.
Sort/Hvid music theatre is classical and rhythmic. Domestic and international. Innovative and old fashioned. Activistic and apathetic. Radical and mainstream. Fearless and terrifying. Uncompromising and compromising. (Black/white).
Organisation
Sort/Hvid is a “small metropolitan theatre” and thus part of a scheme where the state and the municipality together make a total annual contribution to the daily operation of a number of Copenhagen theatres.
In addition, Sort/Hvid gains revenue from ticket sales for performances and other artistic projects. From private and public foundations, the theater receives project support for specific artistic projects.
Management
Nathalie Mellbye
Artistic Director
Karoline Michelsen
Managing Director
Board
Nadia Kløvedal Reich
Chairman of the Board
Director of Development / SPEKTA, Former Manager of Fiction / DR.
Martin Lyngbo
Vice Chairman of the Board
Stage Director / Former Director of Mungo Park
Lise Bach Hansen
Member of the Board
Head of programming Talks & Literature / Royal Danish Library
Christine Ulrich Andersen
Member of the Board
Partner / Neugebauer Clan Law Office
Christian Have
Member of the Board
Owner / Have Kommunikation & PR
Partners
The City of Copenhagen
The Performing Arts Council
Private Foundations
Danish Arts Foundation
The Bikuben Foundation
Realdania
Lokale- og Anlægsfonden
VILLUM FONDEN
A. P. Møller Fonden
Wilhelm Hansen Fonden
Beckett-Fonden
William Demant Fonden
Knud Højgaards Fond
Aage & Johanne Louis-Hansens Fond
Sonning-Fonden
Theatres
The Royal Danish Theatre
Aarhus Teater
Teater Momentum
Teater Nordkraft
International theatres
Nationaltheatret
Dramaten
Staatsschauspil Dresden
Art Institutions
Kunsthal Aarhus
Overgaden – Institut for Samtidskunst
Festivals
Copenhagen Opera Festival
Festspillene i Bergen
CINARS Network
Aarhus Festuge
Companies
Montana