Elle Sofe Sara

Elle Sofe Company expands on the groundbreaking work of Indigenous choreographer, director and film-maker Elle Sofe Sara. A full-time artist since 2007, Sara founded the company in 2022 to make the work—her own and her collaborating partners’—accessible to the wider world. We strive to be innovative, kindhearted and unifying.

The company draws strongly from Sámi culture, which is Indigenous to the Northern parts of nations now known as Sweden, Norway, and Finland; and from Russia’s Murmansk Oblast. A culture born of a fierce climate of ice, the animal world, and quiet intimacy. This work is deeply human and thus available to people of all identities and abilities. We all yearn to belong, to feel held by others, to feel at home in the natural world and, perhaps, to navigate our lives with the use of ancestral knowledge. We welcome you to an old world of new Possibilities.

Elle Sofe Company includes work created by X number of performers, and often involves audience interaction. We co-create unique experiences of dance, yoik (Sámi traditional song) and music, productions that imprint on the mind and give rise to new perspectives. We truly believe that art can change the world for the better by touching people on a deep personal level, creating change in societal structures. Like opening your eyes in a snowstorm and seeing something unexpected.

Giitu Giitu (Thank You Lord) (2019)
Shot on location in Guovdageaidnu (Kautokeino), Finnmark, Norway, Thank You Lord takes us back to a time when lihkahusat, a state of Lestadian trance, occurred in Sápmi.

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