Harald Beharie: Sweet Spot

Sweet Spot is a tempting and seductive hellmouth filled with mischief and tender allure, a hellish pit dancing and kneading itself back and forth between intertwining epochs. Dwelling in the abyss, Sweet Spot conjures a distorted dance macabre in a hypnotic landscape gathering six ecstatic figures who sing, collapse and syncopate around each other.

Driven by a “dromomaniac” pull; an uncontrollable urge to keep moving, Sweet Spot spirals into a ceaseless whirlwind, an abundance of unhinged rhythms, folklore, groovy processions and sudden surges devouring the spectator and everything in its path. 

Sweet Spot is the last part of a trilogy of works which includes the solo piece Batty Bwoy (2022) playing with the fictions surrounding the queer body and the group work Undersang (2024) that takes shape as a collective ritual in the forest. Both previous parts of the trilogy have been presented in Helsinki; Batty Bwoy at Side Step Festival in 2023 and Undersang at URB Festival in 2025.

Together, these works plunge into how pleasure, excess, and monstrosity can become forces for empowerment and transformation while using the body as a site of ambivalence. Where identity and power are constantly negotiated and mutating, unraveling a porous and unstable surface opening up for rituals, new ways of togetherness and uncanny play. 

For this work, Beharie expand their continuous collaboration and research with visual artist Karoline Bakken Lund. Working together since 2017, they examine the poetic and physical possibilities of collapse, where objects, textures and bodies drift between support and obstruction, cultivating porous visual and social landscapes. In Sweet Spot they also collaborate for the first time with light designer Ingeborg Staxerud Olerud and composer and musician Ingvild Langgård. 
 

Harald Beharie (he/they) is a Norwegian-Jamaican performer and choreographer based in Oslo, Norway. 

Beharie’s practice and choreographies often emerge in the tension between the everyday and the extreme, the banal and the sacred, playing with transformation as a continuous principle, for both the body and the spaces they move through. At the core lies a desire to challenge how we sense reality. Their works explore how queerness and the body can act as a medium and a site for revolt, ecstasy, and dissolution

They hold a special interest for the DIY and the vulnerability of being in the unknown.

Beharie is interested in how the body can function as a motor for dramaturgy, a force in itself that transforms through practice. 

Haralds work has received nominations for the Norwegian Critics prize for the performances Shine Utopians with Louis Schou (2020) and the solo work Batty Bwoy (2022). In 2023 Batty Bwoy also won the Hedda prize for “best dance production” and in 2024 the project Undersang won the Norwegian Critics prize 23/24.