AND ALL THE QUESTIONMARKS STARTED TO SING
And All the Questionmarks Started to Sing is a composition in the form of a hybrid between performance, concert and installation . A transparent though complex work with an overhwelming richness of details. It might be described as an art-machine played by musicians, performers and robots.
...Questionmarks... is a work that only slowly reveals all it’s secrets, it’s underlying stories and inner logic. We enter a state of excited surprise that all we wonder about starts to sing instead of giving answers.
Many artists of different backgrounds have left their prints on this work. Ensuring a multitude of ideas threatening to tear the work apart, artistic magnitude and in consequence an articulation of the composition The elements are tied together by kinship, proximity, simultaneity and the belief that differing materials appear as a well moulded whole under the composition.
By treating the whole room and everything in it as the material, the group has created a vast intermedial composition where visual art, sound art and music are combined with the theatrical potential in our material.
The work also demonstrates quite clear the deep fascination Verdensteatret has for all kinds of animation – this strange and somewhat miraculous activity of breading life into dead objects, stiff figures and frozen images. As a spectator you witness the actual creation of moving images at several levels. A dive into the core of the physical building of images, down to where the image arises, takes on solid form, twists and winds into constellations and compounded images.
This landscape of kinetic sculptures creates a room in constant transformation. A room with violent shifts between micro and macro perspectives. From the grand to the miniscule. Each component available as a separate cosmos, an opening for a miniature suspended inside the grand piece. The sonic expression stretches and contracts dephts and distances by moving physically in the room through a network of loudspeakers.The work makes full use of the capacity sound has to create new rooms in the room, make shifts in direction, twist and bend the dimensions. The sound creates a spatial dynamic that pushes beyond the physical and visual scale of the room. Sound, image and movement has melted into one unit and cannot be separated from each other again.
Background.
And All the Questionmarks Started to Sing will be presented as both installation and live performance/concert. Throughout 2009 Verdensteatret developed new audiovisual instruments, machines and kinetic sculptures. These have all a double function as they can run by themselves controlled by computers or they can be played on by musicians and performers in a live setting. The material was first presented at Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou, China in march-april 2010.
The installation will further be exhibited at The Shanghai Biennale from october through december later this year. The first presentation of the live version happens at Festival Theater der Welt, in Essen, Germany in July 2010.
The world premiere of the final version will take place at Black Box Theatre, Oslo in the beginning of September 2010.
By and with: Asle Nilsen, Lisbeth J. Bodd, Håkon Lindbäck, Piotr Pajchel, Christian Blom, Kristine Roald Sandøy, Hai Nguyen Dinh, Ali Djabbary, Øyvind B. Lyse, Gjertrud Jynge, Espen Sommer Eide, Thorolf Thuestad, Eirik Blekesaune, Hans Skogen, Janne Kruse, Jannicke Lie, Elisabeth Gmeiner.
The project is a co-production between Verdensteatret and Black Box Teater (Oslo), BIT Teatergarasjen (Bergen), Theater der Welt, (Germany) and Avant Art Festival, (Poland).
The project is supported by Art Council Norway, Office for Contemporary Art Norway Norwegian Foreign Affairs Verdensteatret is supported by Art Council Norway
