Mellemtiden | Binaural Sound Work / Instruction-Based Performance in Public Space, 7:44 minutes | The Performance Bulletin at Den Frie | June 2025 | Photo: Eau Pernice | Supported by the Danish Arts Foundation
MELLEMTIDEN is an instruction-based performance that takes the audience on a guided tour through public space. The piece is unfolding as a binaural soundscape played through your headphones. It subtly shifts your attention toward fleeting social encounters, each embedded within the everyday urgency of catching the right train. In this new performance, Pernice investigates how asynchrony between sound and space opens a different temporality, MELLEMTIDEN (the in-between time), where unexpected narratives can unfold.
The performance work IN-BETWEEN TIME (Mellemtiden) begins already at the entrance to Den Frie. The audience puts on their own headphones and is instructed by a voice that leads them out into the city, towards Track 13 at Østerport Station. Along the way, reality and staging merge: a three-dimensional soundscape envelops the listener, footsteps set the pace, voices from passersby weave into the scene, and the participant is drawn into a narrative where the train inevitably departs without you.
On the platform, the expectation of arrival dissolves. Two young girls come running onto the platform, but they do not catch the train. Frustration turns into waiting – yet no train ever actually arrives. Instead, one senses invisible trains constantly passing by, a rhythm of movement without destination. Suddenly, the space is broken by an operatic voice: Gustav Mahler’s Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen resounds around you, impossible to place exactly. The song carries a theme of retreating from the world’s noise, not in isolation, but in a conscious state of inner peace, love, and music.
IN-BETWEEN TIME unfolds in this tension: between the hectic rhythm of everyday life and another, more lingering sense of time. The work explores the dislocation between sound and place and invites the participant to experience how time can be felt differently when the familiar is disrupted by the unexpected.The instructions, the three-dimensional soundscape, and the encounter with the city merge into a sensory walk, where the audience’s own body and presence become part of the material. Instead of catching a train, IN-BETWEEN TIMEopens a space for reflection: What happens when we no longer rush to arrive, but instead dwell in the in-between?
