The Inner Ear are a performance collective who are based at the Tank venue in northern Sweden. We are a core group of 3 people (Lee Berwick, Björnola Lind and Mikael Öberg) but we often collaborate with individuals, theatre and performance companies, musicians, artists, venues, technicians etc.
We have been working together for many years (over 15) often at our Tank base but also in the UK and various spots around Scandinavia. We work from a ritual/intention driven perspective often drawing on myth (both modern and ancient) and use characters who personify aspects of the worlds that we are drawn to create/inhabit. Research underpins the methodology with which we work. The reason why something occurs in our works is of prime importance.
We have choreographed, performed in and developed the opening shows for the Urkult festival twice (huge audiences of several thousand and giant extended sound systems along with fire and more fire and ritual) and have made a huge large scale installation through the Clearwell cave network in the Forest of Dean in the UK as well as a string of smaller performances.
Above is the spirit ‘Begalmai’ at our Urkult opening ritual performance in 2014
This is Björnola playing a lamp post in the Tank- he likes to play and circularly breathe along a range of pipes, tubes, etc
This is Mikael Öberg manifesting as an ancient mining spirit who is calling to the bats of Clearwell Caves.
This is me – lurking, in the dark and using an MPC to summon life from the electronics.
The following are some pictures of various performances :-
First some of the show ‘Sound Slick” that we made at the Iklectik Arts Lab in London, Isa Ferri of Iklectik joined us the Tank to help us in some recording (The Still Listening project) and then collaborated with us and helped us to encode our music for the speaker dome that was installed in Iklectik at the time.
We researched the the history of the area around Iklectik/Waterloo in London and Sound Slick was in a sense a journey through this ancient and troubled marsh.
The sound is carried into Iklectik in a bowl to commence proceedings.
Björnolas horn rises above the audience and is nearly as long as Iklectik.
The man in the white coat David Aylward becomes old Father Time, and time unravels. David is a long term collaborator.
Lee and isa busy with the tech
Thankyou audience
At Urkult 2014 we invoked the fire spirits as a part of our performance – here is the Mimi spirit.
And what about this one ?!
and here Skull head’s brains seem to have gone on fire !!
The whole stage is scanned for the thief of fire.
When we did Urkult 2019 with the magnificent Theatre Slava it had more of an arrival of the aliens feeling.
More pictures of more projects could follow but making website pages is not good for me… So I will stop here but more information and a full C.V. is available on request.
More things are in the pipeline and venues, projects are being sought – Get in touch…