Halfdansk Rapsodi

With and by Iben Nagel Rasmussen

Language: Danish
Duration: 60 min.
Min. age: 15 years

Iben Nagel Rasmussen’s story about her father, Halfdan Rasmussen. It is a wild and compelling story about the splintered working-class boy who became the Halfdan of Denmark.

With poetry readings, songs, photos and film fragments, Iben Nagel Rasmussen pieces together a portrait of the more unknown aspects of Halfdan’s life; his upbringing in a childlike family in a two-room apartment in Christianshavn, his early youth with unemployment, his political commitment in the 1930s, his stay at a college, the bicycle trip to Spain where the Civil War was raging, the meeting with other young poet laureates in the Young Artists’ Club during the German occupation and the road to recognition and fame.

HALFDANSK RAPSODI is not a children’s performance, but rather a journey into the, at times, bleak background from which Halfdan’s adult poems grew. Supplemented, of course, by the whimsical, funny, quirky and idiosyncratic rhymes that came to characterise him as a poet.

Premiere d. 29 January 2017 in Fjaltring, Denmark