The oil flowed at Sydhavn Theatre with the performance PETROLEUM - a highly topical performing arts experience about oil as both physical substance and cultural driving force. The performance delves into man's relationship with oil - both the desire and the powerlessness, the beauty and the horror that has characterised our lives with this resource. The work was staged by Sydhavn Theatre's new artistic director, Tina Tarpgaard, in collaboration with choreographer Hilde I Sandvold, and the text was written by Miriam Boelsen.

The audience is invited into a sensory-saturated and critical universe where they get very close to the performers. The performance centres on a woman obsessed with ‘black gold’ and the dream of creating a new, revolutionary oil - an oil that is not extracted from the earth, but from her own body, and that can save the world. The audience becomes her co-conspirators in an alchemical project that challenges the boundaries between reality and illusion, science and mysticism, desire and powerlessness.

The press wrote about PETROLEUM:

‘It is violent, nail-scratchingly unpleasant and animalistic until the ongoing... Sydhavn Theatre's new theatre director, choreographer Tina Tarpgaard, has created a captivating, cross-aesthetic work about oil as an underground resource.’
- Anne Middelboe Christensen, Information

‘With furious force she lets out a primal roar that goes through marrow and time... An obsessive end point as the start of Tarpgaard's new journey between theatre and dance at Sydhavn Theatre.’
- Monna Dithmer, Politiken