Following a year of absence Alter’s the long-standing opening ceremony continues, and marks the beginning of the festival.
Choreographer Asta Herta will present a piece with the group performers Freja Annine De Place, Naia Sif Adam, Cirkeline Kruse Palle Clausen, and visual artist Siri Viola, and with music by Ana Fosca. 
The group have described their ceremony as such:

‘Six performers are invited to open up the festival. They all thought they could do it, with their bodies and the language they know. But now they don’t know. Something has started dissolving itself. It is a smell interfering with their bodies. Somebody says it is a spell, a bridge to hell. 

they tease them self to be brave
and don’t hide
what is awkwardly unknown
it is written in a stone
that we don’t need to carry anymore
F.T.S.S.B.N.
(fuck the system soft, but now)’

Asta Herta is a choreographer and performance artist whose work exists at the intersection of theatre, visual art, and experimental performance. Educated at Fyns Art Academy and currently studying at HZT Berlin, Asta’s practice explores power structures, community, and the ambivalence of identity through world-building and embodied storytelling.

Working with both individual and collective formats—including the performance groups Polly and the recently founded Livgardn—Asta engages with archetypes and systems from a queer, critical perspective. Their performances often center on softness, vulnerability, and contradiction, featuring figures like “fur-clad soldiers more interested in cuddling than fighting” and “exhausted hooligans looking for a break.”

Asta was previously the director and writer of the award-winning collective Teaterkandidaterne, known for its acclaimed site-specific works in collaboration with Teatergrad in Copenhagen. Across projects, Asta builds speculative realities that seek not to escape collapse, but to forge new languages and connections within it—worlds where complexity is embraced, and bridges are built through shared sensation, movement, and presence.