Organisation
Sort/Hvid is a “small metropolitan theatre” and thus part of a scheme where the state and the municipality together make a total annual contribution to the daily operation of a number of Copenhagen theatres.
In addition, Sort/Hvid gains revenue from ticket sales for performances and other artistic projects. From private and public foundations, the theater receives project support for specific artistic projects.
Management
Nathalie Mellbye
Artistic Director
Karoline Michelsen
Managing Director
Board
Nadia Kløvedal Reich
Chairman of the Board
Director of Development / SPEKTA, Former Manager of Fiction / DR.
Martin Lyngbo
Vice Chairman of the Board
Stage Director / Former Director of Mungo Park
Helene Gjerris
Member of the Board
President of the Royal Danish Academy of Music
Lise Bach Hansen
Member of the Board
Head of programming Talks & Literature / Royal Danish Library
Christine Ulrich Andersen
Member of the Board
Partner / Neugebauer Clan Law Office
Christian Have
Member of the Board
Owner / Have Kommunikation & PR
Sort/Hvid
Join the herd queueing up for the theatre trough. Here we fatten you up, massage your body, put sweet music in your trustful ears.
And then: a bullet to the forehead or a squirt of blood from the throat, conventional, of course, or full halal. We drip off, we hang for curing, we cut up, we zealously wrap. At the expiry date the product is dipped in tar and rolled in feathers, before submerged in boiling oil.
From a grey soup, a living creature rises: a body put together of foreign limbs; hooves of goat, wings of rotten fowl, the horns growing from the forehead of the creature. Flex your six tentacles, stretch your crooked legs, look through your new eight sparkling eyes.
Sort/Hvid [Black/White] is a stage in an old slaughterhouse in the meat packing district of Copenhagen. Here art, music and body transform reality. Come and be a part of the mutation.
Profile
Sort/Hvid [Black/White] is one of Copenhagen’s most agenda-setting theatres. Sort/Hvid creates art that examines current social tabus and issues across genre and form. Through collaborations with artists, performers, researchers, theatres, festivals and art institutions both in Denmark and abroad, we toss and turn current issues in the public debate in the pursuit of expanding the public consciousness.
In 2020 The Danish Arts Council selected Sort/Hvid to be a scene for music theatre development from 2021 till 2024, and since prolonged untill 2029. In this period, Sort/Hvid will be the center of music performances across genres and form that seek to develop the understanding of and the conditions for music theatre. Read more here.
Sort/Hvid’s art is produced in a renovated slaughterhouse in the Meatpacking District of Copenhagen with collaborators ranging from independent performing arts groups to established public arts institutions, gaining a much wider outreach than our size allows.
At our location in the Meatpacking district we have about 7000-9000 audiences per year, where Sort/Hvid’s total audience on own and other stages in the country adds up to 15-20,000 annually. The audience is wide ranging in age, and 40 percent of our audience in the Meatpacking District is under 30 years of age.
Sort/Hvid is managed by scenographer and director Nathalie Mellbye, who took over the theatre in 2023 from Christian Lollike. The theatre was founded in 1972 under the name CaféTeatret. In 2014, CaféTeatret changed its name to Sort/Hvid. Just half a year later, the historic theatre in Skindergade burned down. In the spring of 2017, we opened our new theatre in Staldgade in the Meatpacking District with the support of the City of Copenhagen, private foundations and almost 400 private followers who backed our crowdfunding campaign. Here, Sort/Hvid is housed today.