The dancer and choreographer Sarah Aviaja Hammeken shared her personal journey of reconnecting with Greenlandic culture in her meditative performance Soil. Through movement, music, and spoken word, Hammeken weaves a conceptual framework in which her interaction with soil onstage is perceived as an attempt, even a struggle, to root herself in a culture that has long seemed distant.
The stage is divided into two parts: the soil and a chair. In the soil, the dancer’s exposed body twists and staggers, rises, and collapses back into the black earth, struggling to take root, to absorb, and to grow. Yet the choreography is mechanical, repetitive, and at times unsettling, accompanied by the cold clashing of objects. By creating this dissonance between her body and the soil, Hammeken reveals the difficulty of seeking organic harmony with cultural roots that feel remote.
At intervals, the dancer leaves the soil and sits in the chair, narrating her thoughts and reflections on belonging and language. While this section articulates the artistic ideas of the performance, it sometimes feels disconnected from the dance and fails to maintain the emotional energy generated by the movement. As a result, Soil remains a static juxtaposition of “demonstration” (dance) and “explanation” (language), without developing into a coherent and integrated narrative.
The concepts of the performance are compelling, but their execution proves less effective. The opening ten minutes lack change or development, and once the audience grasps the duality of demonstration and explanation, there is little variation. In the final moments, Hammeken speaks in Kalaallisut, the Greenlandic language, intending to answer her questions about language and cultural identity. Conceptually, this should be powerful, yet in practice it risks distancing the audience: without translation or further expressive means, the moment leaves viewers more confused than connected to Greenlandic culture.
In the end, Soil is artistically ambitious but regrettably monotonous.
