Borealis - a festival for experimental music

Borealis is a festival for genre crossing music and art that takes place over 5 days each March in Bergen, Norway. The festival presents concerts, installations, performances, lectures, film screenings and radio broadcasts at concert venues of all sizes across the city – from art galleries and cultural arenas to surprising places you may not have visited before. Borealis is a place for adventurous listeners, celebrating music that doesn’t fit neatly in to any boxes. We present new projects from Norway and around the world that push the boundaries of what music is and how we listen.

But we are more than just five days of concerts and events in March. As an organisation we are here all year round, thinking about how we can create experiences and spaces that reflect the society we live in, whilst trying to contribute to the society we want to see. For us this means working hard to present gender balance in our programming and giving space for many different expressions of excellence. It means thinking not just about who is on stage, but about who feels excluded from our audience. We do this work through our project Borealis Radius which is intricately woven into the way the organsation works. Outside of the festival our Borealis Listening Club creates a space for people to listen to new sounds together, and our Borealis Ung Komponist mentoring scheme helps build a grassroots new music culture in the West of Norway.