Soy Milk


Performance for five languages in canon: Norwegian, Swedish, English, German and Danish. Duration: 25 minutes loop


Translators: Julie Stokkendal, Markus Lantto, Saskia Vogel, Richard Stoiber and Kenn Mouritzen

Actors: Minni Katina Mertens, Golshid Rokhzan, Alex Lehman and Constantin Gindele.

Dramaturg: Gritt Uldall-Jessen.

Photo by Mikkel Høgh Kaldal

Soy Milk

     Performed at Kunsthal Aarhus, 2020

Five monologues are performed in canon by five actors, whose voices are interwowen in a dynamic arrangement. Sometimes individual words or sentences are allowed to stand out, while others overlap and mirror each other in kaleidoscopic soundscapes.

The performance is based on a monologue originally written in Danish, in which a first person narrator talks about being in their apartment, listening to their neighbor through the wall, talking on the phone, reading emails and chatting with a friend, who lives on the other side of the Atlantic. In the monologue language flows through several channels, communication and miscommunication happens, stories are told and assumptions are made. This original monologue has gone through a chain of translations: from Danish to Norwegian, from Norwegian to Swedish, from Swedish to English, from English to German and from German back to Danish. All five translations were made by litterary translators, and only the first translator in the chain got to consult the original Danish text - the others had to follow their own instincts and thereby set the text i motion.

The narrator's gender is not mentioned in the text but is embodied by the performers in different ways. Nor is the narrator's neighbor's gender mentioned, and this ambiguity is dealt with in different ways by the five translators, thereby illuminating how each language provides specific frameworks within or outside which we can understand and express gender that exists beyond the binary.

The title refers to a joke that appears in the text: What if soy milk is just milk introducing itself in Spanish? The point of the joke is a pun on the word soy, which in English refers to the plant and in Spanish means 'I am'. The central story of the joke – not being understood when introducing yourself because you seem to speak different languages – becomes an image of the difficulty of expressing non-binary and gender nonconforming identities in a culture that doesn't have language for it.


The five translated monologues were published as an artist book by Forlaget Aleatorik.