To Be Entrusted With Memory –Reflections on creating Wind Between the Islands

There are invitations an artist receives that feel like professional opportunities. And then there are those that arrive as a form of trust.

Being invited to create Wind Between the Islands is something I continue to hold with quiet humility. As someone shaped by other geographies — by departures as much as arrivals — I have learned never to take belonging for granted. Yet to be entrusted with creating a work that enters the cultural memory of a city carries a different weight altogether.

It is an honor that stretches beyond the present.

When a film is made in recognition of a historical moment — a gesture toward who a community has been, who it is becoming, and what it dares to imagine — it does not live only in the now. It leans toward the future. Perhaps long after we are gone, someone may encounter these images and sense how Kristiansund once breathed.

To create with that awareness changes how one moves as an artist. You become less interested in imprinting vision and more devoted to listening. Less concerned with authorship, and more attentive to custodianship. Because to make something that may endure is, in many ways, to agree to help hold memory.

Atlanten Danselinje og koreograf Tendai Makurumbandi under opptak på Innlandet ved Bautaen.

Arriving without assuming

Coming from elsewhere can sharpen perception. It teaches you to notice what familiarity sometimes renders invisible. I did not want to approach Kristiansund as either outsider or insider. Both positions assume too much certainty. Instead, I entered the process guided by a quieter question: How does one listen oneself into a place?

The answer revealed itself gradually — across shorelines and ferry crossings, through conversations interrupted by weather, in the everyday choreography of people moving through their lives. Rather than placing dance onto the city, I began to sense that the city itself was already dancing.

In its reconstructed architecture, carrying histories of rupture and renewal.

In the endurance of older generations.

In the forward-leaning imagination of the young.

In the subtle negotiations that allow a shared future to take form.

What emerged was not choreography set against a landscape, but choreography arising from relationship.

Choreography as societal practice

For many years, I have understood choreography not only as stage composition, but as a way of reading the social body — of noticing how histories settle into posture, how communities organize themselves through proximity, and how futures are rehearsed in everyday gestures. Creating this film during a time of cultural transformation meant entering a living process rather than observing it from a distance. It required an artistic posture shaped less by control and more by attunement.

Less certainty.

More reciprocity.

Less declaration.

More listening.

At its core, this work asked me to consider what choreography might become when it moves beyond the theatre and enters civic space.

Choreographing across difference

One of the deepest privileges of this process was working with people from different backgrounds, generations, and relationships to movement — trained dancers alongside individuals who had never imagined their bodies inside an artistic work. This was not a symbolic gesture. It was foundational to the film’s language.

Because when choreography is understood only as the arrangement of highly trained bodies, we risk overlooking its profound social potential. But when many kinds of bodies enter the choreographic field — young and old, practiced and untrained, newly arrived and deeply rooted — choreography begins to mirror society itself.

In the encounters between dancers and non-dancers, something quietly transformative appeared: a shared space where virtuosity was no longer the primary currency.

Presence was.

Some carried movement through technique.

Others through lived experience.

All carried knowledge.

Again and again, I was reminded that every body is already choreographed — by labor, by care, by migration, by memory, by survival, by joy.

The task was never to teach people how to move, but to create conditions in which their movement could be recognized, trusted, and dignified. What unfolds in the film is therefore not only dance. It is participation. It is relation. It is a small yet meaningful portrait of how a community moves when invited into a shared artistic gesture.

This is where choreography approaches societal practice — not as representation, but as encounter.

Skapende Dans etter filmopptak i Nerparken.

Working with the timescale of the future

At several moments during the process, I found myself thinking about time in expanded terms. What does it mean to create something that might outlive you? Something that could be revisited centuries from now?

We cannot decide what survives. But the intention to create with longevity transforms artistic responsibility.

It calls us away from spectacle and toward sincerity.

Instead of chasing immediacy, I found myself drawn to quieter layers:

movement shaped by vibration

attention guided by ritual

bodies carrying memory

landscapes that remember

If the film endures, I hope it does so not because it attempts to capture everything, but because it listens.

Belonging as a continuous act

As someone whose life has been shaped by migration, I have come to understand belonging not as a fixed state, but as a practice — something we continually create through participation, attention, and care. Encounters with residents across generations revealed shared rhythms beneath apparent difference. Community appeared less as a finished structure and more as an ongoing choreography shaped by how we meet one another.

Belonging, then, is less about origin.

More about relation.

Toward a cultural heart

The journey of Wind Between the Islands leads toward Normoria, envisioned as a future cultural heart for the city. Yet what this process clarified for me is that a cultural heart is never only a building.

It is a collective willingness to gather.

To remain open.

To imagine together.

Culture is not something we inherit passively — it is something we continuously choreograph through presence and responsibility.

What this trust has asked of me

Every artistic process leaves a trace in the artist who undertakes it. This one has deepened my sense of responsibility — not only to the work itself, but to the people and landscapes that allowed it to emerge.

To be given this opportunity as someone who came from elsewhere is not something I experience as symbolic. I experience it as relational. It speaks to the possibility of a society that understands culture as enriched by multiple perspectives, and that recognizes listening as a form of contribution.

Working at the intersection of art and societal movement has reaffirmed something I carry forward:

The role of the artist is not only to create work, but to cultivate spaces where sensing becomes possible again.

Spaces where we slow down.

Where complexity is allowed.

Where memory is treated with care.

Where futures can be gently rehearsed.

As we approach the official screening, I do not think of this film as a finished statement. I think of it as an offering — one gesture within a much longer story still unfolding.

Because ultimately, this work was never only about dance.

It was about trust.

About listening across difference.

About honoring a place while allowing oneself to be shaped by it.

And perhaps, above all, it has led me to this reflection:

Perhaps the future of choreography is not only found in exceptional bodies, but in our growing ability to move together.

— Tendai Makurumbandi