From 2019 to late 2023, Björk toured her immersive audio-visual concert experience Cornucopia around the world. The concerts clocked in at almost two hours, with the Icelandic goddess singing and dancing onstage the entire show. Sadly, the Pacific Northwest wasn’t a stop on the tour, but there’s now another way to experience the abundant splendor of Cornucopia.

On Wednesday, May 7, filmgoers got a chance to experience Björk’s Cornucopia on the big screen as part of a diffuse world-premiere event. Portland’s Westside film darling, Cinema 21, screened Björk: Cornucopia—the concert film capturing her Lisbon, Portugal date in September 2023—to a sold out audience. 

In the main house of Cinema 21, a multi-generational crowd undulated with excitement as theater-goers clamored for seats, found their friends, and ran into familiar faces they hadn’t seen in years—all to see Björk, the great connector, bridger of gaps between genders, languages, and species.

Cornucopia is grandiose, overwhelming, and at times over the top. But those are the times we live in—that is how emotions can feel when falling in love, feeling your way through grief, or when thinking about a utopia you know can exist but can’t find a way to create… yet.

Breaking the fourth wall, Björk calls on the Lisbon audience—and now viewers around the world—to imagine a utopian future where humans and nature and technology coexist. She asks put yourself in that utopia, do everything you can to make it happen. There are very few people in the world with such influence who use their platform, their art, their very existence in the ways this literal deity does.

You don’t have to have been paying attention to Björk or her music too long or too closely to know she is a deeply sensual being, holistically in touch with her Self and her body. The fourth single from her 1993 debut Debut, “Big Time Sensuality,” introduced us to the then 28-year-old feeling the curves of her own body, in the song’s music video, as she dances on the bed of a flatbed truck driving through Manhattan. 

In Cornucopia, the now 59-year-old mother of two shared, in song, that she enjoys oral and anal sex. Though giggles rippled through the theater’s audience, these proclamations are so powerful: the normalizing of sex that’s not for procreation, sex that doesn’t center cis men. Pleasure doesn’t belong to the young, it doesn’t belong to anyone. We—humans, Americans especially—need to recontextualize what it means to be in relation, in love, and in community with one another and the planet. Björk is a medium we should be tapping into more deeply. 

The stage (and screen)’s massive backdrop framed Björk with constantly shifting visuals and various world-building. Members of the Icelandic flute ensemble Viibra cut mime-like shapes—akin to Klaus Nomi choreography—while harpist Katie Buckley sat firmly planted stage-left with her towering instrument. If Iceland's Hamrahlíð Choir hadn’t been visually present, we would have mistaken their otherworldly harmonies for synthesizers.

It took a couple songs, but once the collective in the theater realized the natural cadence of a live concert was also the cadence of the screening, everyone started clapping after every song, with a few loud whistlers thrown in the mix. Audience members were chatting between songs, laughing and gasping and cheering at what was being presented. It’s a concert film that absolutely should be seen in a theater, in community—creating a similar energy and collective experience only possible seeing music live.

Before Cornucopia screened, an onscreen message suggested the audience stay after the film to see three music videos that would complement—or maybe explain—the concert. They were: “Atopos,” “Arisen My Senses” featuring Arca, and “Blissing Me.” Seeing three Björk music videos on a big screen was spectacular enough, let alone the almost two-hour emotional cleansing of the concert.

As fate would have it, I was sat next to Portland artist Vania Vananina. We found out that both of us had seen Björk live during her Volta Tour in 2007 (at Coachella and Sasquatch! respectively). As Cinema 21’s biggest theater emptied with the audience gathering in the lobby and out front to externalize emotions, Vananina explained that “the film translated so well from the actual live experience. We obviously weren’t there but it felt like we were, it felt like we were in the Lisbon audience with thousands of other people to see Björk.” And it’s true, seeing the film at the cinema we did with the people who would be at this screening—”Björk heads” as Vananina said laughing—it felt like a live experience… It was a live experience.

Björk: Cornucopia is a limited run film that will be screening two more times at Cinema 21—Sat May 10 & Sun May 11, 4 pm, tickets here. The May 7 premiere screening sold out, don’t get caught crying outside the theater when you should be crying inside the theater.

P.S. In this house we don’t believe in call-out culture, rather a calling in. So this is a call-in to Björk: You haven’t played the Pacific Northwest in 18 years… It’s time, girl.