Shibboleth performance at Stockholmspalavern

A Unique Artistic Experience

Scensalong

In our intimate salon, something of the closeness and concentration of the literary salon lives on.

Here, you encounter a Shibboleth performance: a collage of text and music, performed by two voices.

Different genres meet without explaining one another. Poetry, prose, documentary texts and commentary are interwoven with music — from art music to popular music, from the medieval to the avant-garde. Musical passages and fragments of text move in an intense interplay, in continual shifts between artistic forms.

Afterwards, the space opens for conversation — not to explain what has happened, but to allow different interpretations to meet.

I came to Shibboleth unprepared, with no expectations and no knowledge of what awaited me. We were to be offered "entertainment."

But it became something entirely different. Intense, startling, insistent, overwhelming. Joy and sorrow, dissonance and harmony, could be felt in the body at the same time. And the abrupt shifts, interruptions and transitions into something altogether different could be demanding …

Shibboleth is more than an encounter with art in the ordinary sense. What I remember from that single occasion fifteen years ago is the atmosphere: the uncanny, the disturbing, the alarming — but also a glimmer of hope.

And the music, which quite unexpectedly broke through on several occasions and shook me. The impressions left upon the soul have remained throughout all these years

Kjell Andersen

Psychiatrist and psychotherapist

It was a dark and unsettling spring evening. I moved through the dim passageways beneath the Royal Dramatic Theatre, searching for the room where our session was to be held and where all disguises would finally fall away.

It was a treacherous total work of art in which a great darkness opened up. There were texts about terrible and disturbing experiences, literature devoid of beauty that I had never wished to read, which opened wounds in the soul and made the floor give way into sinkholes beneath me.

There is no return from certain journeys. They remain in the mind, and life is never the same. This seemed to me to be such a journey: an enriching rite de passage in an inward sense, where two deep tunnels open beneath a vast vault:

I understand you, and I understand myself.

Anders Hallengren

Associate professor, author and discussion leader of the Shibboleth experiment.

Advisor at Harvard Alumni Career Network.

I had no idea what awaited me. I found myself in a "literary salon." What the rest of the audience and I were "subjected to" was a text by Elfriede Jelinek interwoven with quotations from the Song of Songs in the Bible.

Already then, I became aware of what was so distinctive about Shibboleth. I was moved — so moved that I realised I might never again be able to separate the two texts.

I remember thinking that the discussion afterwards was heading entirely in the wrong direction, and so I asked to speak.

"Love is a rare bird," I said.

I remember it as though a wild and chaotic battle were raging within me.

Jan Henrik Swahn

Author and facilitator of reflection in the Shibboleth Experiment