Tickets for sale on May 7, 2026
Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen’s sculptures brought to life through dance
Creatures of Butter takes its point of departure from a small but revealing gesture in the life of the iconic Danish sculptor Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen. As a young girl growing up on a farm, before she had access to clay or plaster, she would take pieces of butter and sculpt the animals she saw around her. Butter was her first sculptural material: soft, immediate, responsive to the hand. This instinctive act of shaping matter becomes a poetic starting point for the piece. The title evokes both the fragility of the material and the vitality of the creatures that inspired her early practice — animals observed closely, translated through touch, and held briefly in form before melting back into transformation.
The work draws inspiration from the vitalist atmosphere surrounding Carl-Nielsen’s time, when artists and thinkers explored life as a field of invisible forces shaping matter and form. Choreographer Marina Mascarell reimagines Carl-Nielsen’s sculptural language through the living body, transforming the stage into a studio-like landscape where process and transformation remain visible. The piece is not a portrait of Anne Marie, but a celebration of her work and boldness — of the courage it takes to claim space, to insist on scale, and to work against the weight of expectation. As in sculpture, the choreography unfolds within a field of forces — weight, tension, fragility, luminosity — images for human struggle and determination. CREATURES OF BUTTER brings together dance, live percussion, and visual design in an artistic encounter between Marina Mascarell, percussionist Ying-Hsueh Chen, visual artist Rasmus Myrup, and lighting designer Leticia Skrycky.
WITH GENEROUS SUPPORT FROM: Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsens Legat
Direction: Marina Mascarell
Choreography: Marina Mascarell & the dancers of Danish Dance Theatre
Music & Live Performance: Ying-Hsueh Chen (percussion)
Visual Concept & Costumes: Rasmus Myrup
Performers: The ten dancers of Dansk Danseteater
Co Produced by: Dansk Danseteater & Bora Bora
Light Designer: Leticia Skrycky
Subject specialist and heritage consultant: Emilie Boe Bierlich
Photo: Petra Kleis
Thank you to: Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen Centret in Odense
The performance is part of Danish Dance Theatre’s scenography residency, supported by the Wilhelm Hansen Foundation.
