THE
MOUNTAIN
BODY
Reykjavik, Iceland
Waiting for the Elves
In this commissioned work for the Reykjavík Dance Festival, audiences were welcomed into the home of Palestinian author Mazen Maarouf.
Within this intimate, domestic setting, they were invited to take part in slow, sensory-based meditations that circled around loss, friendship, geology, politics, and the subtle entanglements that bind these themes together.
Nature is often imagined as something external to us — an elsewhere we seek outdoors. Waiting for the Elves proposes the opposite: an invitation to bring what we typically regard as external into the interior, to sense how landscapes, histories, and imaginaries live within us, are part of us, and becomes a personal landscape.
Mazen Maarouf composed an original text for the work, performed by Helle Siljeholm. The piece premiered during the Reykjavík Dance Festival.
Hosted in Mazen’s Reykjavík home, the work gestures toward Beckett’s Godot, toward absurdism, stillness, political tension, and the presence of spirits. Its title holds both reverence and irony — and perhaps something more: a willingness to believe, or at least to suspend disbelief. For belief, like geology and like performance, is layered, tectonic, unfolding in slow, shifting motion.
Waiting for the elves was developed by writer Mazen Maarouf, curator Lisa Gilardino and choreographer and visual artist Helle Siljeholm. commissioned by Reykjavik dance festival and funded by Perform Europe.