LOVE LOVE

LOVE LOVE began with a dream. “I had this strange dream, I played tennis.”

It did not become a work about tennis. What remained was a fascination with the sound-world of tennis, and with the convergence of kinetic energy it gathers and releases. LOVE LOVE unfolds as a play without points, without winners, without an end.

The music takes shape in collaboration with Ensemble Adapter (Matthias Engler and Gunnhildur Einarsdóttir) and Salka Valsdóttir; the movement with choreographer Leah Marojević.

The ludic runs through Arnbjörg María Danielsen’s work. Not as entertainment or diversion, but as a serious structural principle. A game creates conditions. Actions provoke responses. What matters is not arriving somewhere, but remaining within the play long enough for its logic to emerge.

Danielsen works in spatial composition. Music, sound, staging, the visual field, objects, light, the movement of bodies in time are composed as a single register, related rather than coordinated. Music does not accompany what happens. It generates the conditions through which the work unfolds.

Sound gives the work its shape, marking what is to be seen, heard, and held through time. Bodies move through sounds, actions, and tasks, repeating, adjusting, tiring, persisting, beginning again. The body is at once an instrument and the thing that wears down in real time.

Through this sustained engagement, concentration becomes visible. Over time, concentration deepens into flow: not ease, but absorption. A condition in which performers and audiences alike become immersed in the unfolding logic of the game.

Out of this sustained attention, beauty emerges. At a time when beauty is often approached with suspicion, Danielsen insists on its artistic necessity. Not as decoration, but as a way of encountering complexity.

In tennis, love means zero. Here, zero becomes a state of suspension, the charged moment before something begins again. LOVE LOVE inhabits that interval.

LOVE LOVE was premiered at Reykjavík Arts Festival on 9 June 2026 in Harpa Concert Hall.