Actor and writer Ida Johannessen
Consultant director Johanne Fridahl Willmann
Documentarian Rigmor Børge Ranthe
Creative Producer Karla Grosser
Title Explained
The title Yours, Devoted speaks to the women in my lineage who gave everything, often at the expense of their own voices. It carries both love and loss with the desire to belong and the danger of disappearing into care. This devotion has shaped generations of women who lacked a mother figure and struggled to hold their own space. The performance is an act of reclaiming that devotion, not as sacrifice, but as self-understanding.
Workshop & Teamwork
Although Yours, Devoted is performed solo, the process is built on artistic exchange and with a foundation of a written script. I collaborate with creative producer Karla Grosser and sparring from Johanne Willmann. Together, we develop the framework, research, and ethics around representing lived female experience. The work draws from interviews and dialogues across generations, connecting individual stories to shared cultural memory.
Female Representation On and Off Stage
This project is created by women and about women, and yet it resists idealisation. It explores the contradictions of being both strong and wounded, caring and exhausted. Through my performance, I aim to show complexity rather than perfection: womanhood not as a fixed identity but as a lived negotiation. The protagonist, Vicky, is a writer trying to make sense of her lineage. For me, both writing and performing this project, I play seriously, holding the process up as a creative mirror for my own artistic search to find language for what was left unsaid.
Social Issues
Yours, Devoted engages with intergenerational trauma, motherhood, and silence. It raises questions about how shame, love, and dependency are passed on — and how storytelling can become an act of repair. The work seeks to include lived female experiences in the professional process, ensuring authenticity, care, and awareness of vulnerability.
Audio / Extra Archive
Sound is a vital element in Yours, Devoted. In collaboration with musician Emil Johannessen, I use sound as both memory and ritual — from the hum of a kettle to layers of voice and tone. These sonic fragments form an emotional landscape that connects domestic intimacy with collective experience. The sound aims to balance trauma and tenderness — to find hope in the everyday.
Note – While the moodboard and the making of the play take great inspiration from a real story, the life and family of the author and writer Tove Ditlevsen and her impact on Danish culture and history – my research is taking on the urgency to study and have a story to be told in the community and voices of women in Europe. Taking Tove Ditlevsen life into account her story is deeply embedded in me as a Danish artist and my urge to have a more authentic female lineage told and strong female voices on stage.
Dramatised or not – This family in the play doesn’t exist and the story in the play isn't real but fiction. The mood board explores inspirational conversation of the generation, the interest in staging rituals, female generational storytelling and, more specifically the want of staging everyday rituals.
Project description
Yours, Devoted is a solo performance exploring the cost of devotion. It focuses on how love, care, and duty can dissolve the self. It unfolds as an embodied reckoning with absence: the missing mother, the inherited silence, and the longing for tenderness across generations.
This project unfolds as a hybrid between performance and exhibition: a living archive of voices, objects, and stories that invite the audience into an intergenerational dialogue about shame, survival, and tenderness. The piece moves between text, sound, and movement, forming a monologue that blurs the line between confession, memory, and imagination.
Yours, Devoted is a performative exploration of womanhood, inheritance, and survival. The work draws inspiration from Tove Ditlevsen’s uncompromising gaze on female experience and from her granddaughter Lise Munk Thygesen’s book Tove Ditlevsen var min mormor, where silence, shame, and love are revealed as generational legacies. Their voices form a resonance space for my own. An attempt to understand how womanhood is inherited, repeated, and rewritten in the body, the language, and the encounter.
The play introduces magical realism to explore the theme of grief and strong bonds. Vicky is accompanied by her deceased mother and grandmother, and through small moments of humour, the play relives their complex and unconditional love. Although the play focuses on trauma, it also highlights small moments of life with a comedic perspective.
The concept of location
Yours, Devoted unfolds in a shared, lived space. It is not a literal home, but one suggested through small objects, gestures, and traces of presence. A lamp, a cup, the sound of a kettle, simulating fragments that build the belief of a home. The domestic setting becomes a metaphor for inheritance, where memory, absence, and love coexist. By working within this fragile architecture, I seek to reveal the emotional rooms women inhabit across generations.
The drama starts with Vicky finding her mother's “secrets”. Vicky´s mother, Ellen, has passed away and left archieved secrets that have been kept away from the public. When dealing with the secrets, Vicky is joined by her mother Ellen, and her grandmother Irma as Vicky awakens from a hallucination of their company while grieving over the family history.
The concept of location
I am interested in creating theatre that has a world we resonate in but it's a creative imaginary world of its own. The setting is a somewhere feeling of being in a lived home. The stage has a sense of being a piece of loved whole home and the atmosphere can spark the imagination or, conversely, carry the weight of the people who lived in the house history. I choose to work with these spaces of a home cause I also fantasise and want to raise awareness of a political issue that there in Ireland is a need for more accommodations.
The play takes primarily place in a staged living room/ study with an entrance to a kitchen you never see but only hear in the sense that tea is being made during the play.
Methaphorically choosing home as a setting, I want to break down the walls and go deeper into the conflicts in a three generational lineage of strong female artists.
The play follows Vicky's quest to find a box of her mother's belongings called "Secrets," which reveals Ellen and her grandmother's experiences. Additionally, the poems in the text, will bring a comforting and dramaturgical story to the play. I intend to tell a story that highlights a female-led ensemble. The play uses the female body's appearance, silence, and everyday sounds to create an atmosphere that highlights the quality of the bonds between the characters. The Three-Act structure leads to a climax in Act One when three letters from Victor to Ellen reveal an abusive relationship. In Act Two, the truth is revealed about how Irma knew about every secret in Ellen's life but did not help take care of them. The climax of Act Two is when Vicky confronts both Ellen and Irma about their actions and realises that they all need a mother figure.
Vicky faces her mother's postpartum depression and their strained relationship in the study.
Reading and memorising how her grandmother read poems of Irmas making, Vicky makes rituals of forgiveness and talks with herself in the sense of magical realism where she joined forces with her companied memory of her grandmother and mother being there. She steps further into being the one to break the old structures of mothers before her, by writing down what she openly discovers.
I have various visions for this play. My primary goal is to establish a strong relationship between the three women characters in the story. I believe that silence is a powerful language, and I want to incorporate it into the play. Sounds will also play a significant role in the production. Working with the strong women in the Tollelund family, I have observed the empowerment that comes from their unconditional love and support for each other. The love they share is evident in their interactions, both verbal and nonverbal. Incorporating rituals into the performance will involve reenacting daily habits, such as drinking tea or eating together, as well as religious practices like seeking forgiveness from a divine entity. This approach will allow the characters to break free from the confines of their everyday lives through nonverbal and performative acts.
Vicky is vigorously typing away, determined to bring her story to light. She is working on a powerful draft for her book that will showcase her family's lineage and her unwavering belief in the crucial role of parenthood and the deep bond it creates between parents and their children.
Irma is a famous author, playwright, poet, activist, and feminist. Irma had Ellen with her second husband. Irma Tollelund committed suicide from an overdose of sleeping pills and passed away at the age of 63. She left her loved one's letters and all the people in the world great literature and poems.
Ellen is a poet, screen writer, author and mother to Vicky. Ellen committed suicide at the age of 55 from an overdose of morphine in the painful state of breast cancer. Ellen is the daughter of the famous author and writer, Irma. She is the mother to Vicky. She had Vicky when she was twenty with her first husband. Ellen left her daughter Vicky a journal of secrets, explaining all the dark secrets that kept her and Vicky having a mother-daughter relationship.
Vicky is the narrator of the story. She is a writer in her early thirties. She has a daughter Louise with her first husband Paul, who is from Ireland. Vicky and Paul got divorced due to Paul's drinking problem, but they remain close friends. Vicky has now found love again and is engaged to Jonathan, who is in his late thirties. Vicky is the granddaughter of Irma and the daughter of Ellen. Vicky is an only child and loves being a mother. Her family lineage includes strong-spoken female writers, authors, and feminist activists who have made their voices heard. However, according to Vicky, there hasn't been a strong sense of mother figures in the family for decades.
