An old university lecturer took a packet of tobacco out of his jacket pocket, after having spent the whole morning explaining the basic

concepts of Aristotelian Metaphysics to a group of first-year students. ‘In every physical substance there lies a potential form’, he said

to the students while he quickly rolled a cigarette between his fingers. ‘And the point is,’ he continued, pausing to lick the cigarette

paper, ‘that the form must of necessity be realised from the substance. But what about this cigarette? How shall its form be realised

if its substance is not to disappear?’ He lit the cigarette and took two deep drags. ‘When its form is realised, it also ceases to exist as

substance – it just ends up as ash.’ The lecturer smiled and shut the door behind him.

We have just recounted how an old lecturer challenged the philosophical system that he had taught throughout his adult life. But this

anecdote also touches on some important aspects of Verdensteatret’s work. As with the lecturer’s cigarette, it is pointless to speak

of a fundamental form, an idea that is to be realised as well as possible in the artistic material. And just like the lecturer’s cigarette,

Verdensteatret’s art takes form at the same moment as it disappears.

Instead of beginning with an all-encompassing idea, Verdensteatret takes the ashes as its starting-point, collecting fragments of contexts

that may once have had meaning; old scrap that they have picked up from the roadside; a story that someone may once have read for

them; a dream that someone once had. They call it flotsam, things that have come floating by, that may once have had a purpose. And

through Verdensteatret’s work, the flotsam is transformed into something aesthetic; twisted, bent and carefully reassembled to create

new contexts. Verdensteatret’s art is born when all these elements begin to work together. But their art is not the sculptures that they

have created, nor the pictures that they project, nor the rusty mechanisms that they operate. It is the shadows that fall on the back wall,

the shrieking machinery, the joke that you can’t understand because it is told in a foreign language, the sound of a man hammering

away on a piano. Verdensteatret’s art is everything that comes into being and disappears again in the same instant.

Verdensteatret has existed since 1986. For 20 years, the group has moved in many different directions. But on one point they stand

fast: their connection to the European, and especially the German, theatrical tradition, with Brecht, Walter Benjamin and Heiner

Müller as natural references. The latter has a special tendency to appear in their work – but you may not necessarily recognise him.

Because Verdensteatret treats texts as flotsam, too – not as literary monuments, but as open landscapes in which they must orientate

themselves.

Following experiments in fields such as visual performance, environmental theatre and text theatre, in recent years the group has

worked towards a more intermedial form. Today, Verdensteatret consists of video artists, computer animators, sound engineers,

musicians, artists and a painter – among others. They develop their work in a ‘flat structure’ – or, as they themselves explain, ‘everyone

interferes with everything’. In this way they search for a form that includes many means of expression and despite the fact that it and

involves a good dose of quarrelling it can be experienced or understood as ‘integrated’. Video pictures are processed with distorting

mirrors and human voices are digitalised, synthetic elements are turned into organic ones, and vice versa. One of Verdensteatret’s

favourite metaphors is that ‘the various elements should bleed into one another’, so that every dramatic element is linked to the others

in so many different ways that we cannot tell where one ends and the other begins. Thus a vast game of references is set in motion,

without presenting any clear meanings – instead an associative space is created where infinite numbers of new opinions can arise and

disappear.

Verdensteatret does not present plots, or concepts that have to be explained, or structures to be unravelled. Their work is not based on

a truth or an urtext that has to be interpreted, and it therefore has more in common with concerts, or with technical marvels. It is not

Verdensteatret that produces the art, it is the machine. They simply make it work.

The name ‘Verdensteatret’ means ‘Theatre of the World’, but you should immediately cast aside thoughts of the worn-out metaphor

that says ‘all the world’s a stage’ – even though it is just that. Think instead of the old cinemas from the early days of film, where people

crowded in to be blinded by pictures they had never seen before, and by the wonderful technology that gave them these pictures. If

we opened the door to one of these picture palaces, we would find machinery rusting away, and we might perhaps smile sadly at the

fascination for things that once were new and spectacular. Verdensteatret takes us into such spaces and fills them with its own futuristic

dream – samplers, Powerbooks and video projectors, technology that we may find fascinating now, but which will end up on the scrap

heap after not too long. By combining them to form a rusty shadow theatre, Verdensteatret shows us that our own futuristic fantasies

are also about to disappear – but that they will continue telling those, too.

The Telling Orchestra is the remains of a piece that was once called Concert for Greenland, but that no longer exists as theatre.

However, The Telling Orchestra is hardly a relic of something that once existed; rather, Concert for Greenland was a concrete,

time-limited performance using a machine that still exists, and that now tells other stories. The parts for the machine were collected

during a trip to Greenland, an arctic subcontinent of an island that casts a shadow over us, and a country more affected by poverty and

alcoholism than perhaps its idyllic population statistics might suggest. Greenland is known to me through the Inuit beggars at the main

railway station in Copenhagen, and through news items that tell us that the ice sheet is melting. But Verdensteatret found something

completely different there.louder is also inspired by a journey. The landscape of the Mekong delta has achieved an almost mythical

status in contemporaryhistory, first through news reports, and perhaps most of all through Francis Ford Coppola’s doomsday

film scenario from 1978.Last winter, Verdensteatret sailed up the same river that in Apocalypse Now plays the veins and arteries around

the heart of darkness.What they experienced there is neither very clear, nor very important, but the journey beats like a pulse throughout the performance.

If Verdensteatret wanted to be obvious, they could have called the piece closer. Or darker. Where Concert for Greenland introduced

us to a finely-tuned machinery, a space where we could sit and watch from a distance, louder takes us inside the machinery. Gone is

the comforting frame of an artwork. There is no longer a stage. Instead we enter a room full of chaos. A room that threatens to fall

apart before our eyes. In louder, chance is not tempered by finely-tuned mechanics – here total dissolution and disorder are a genuine

and constant possibility.You may not recognise Verdensteatret as theatre, and they themselves compare their work to machines and

musico-spatial compositions. They have perhaps most in common with installation artists such as Christian Boltanski, who works in

the same way with shadows, history and disappearances.

Or perhaps with one of installation art’s older heroes, the Hungarian Nicolas Schöffer, who in the 1950s and 1960s planned monuments

and futuristic cities, constructed ballets of light and kinesthetic machines; -electromechanical sculptures that created enormous plays

of light and shadow. Nicolas Schöffer wrote that the task of the artist is not to produce meaning, but to produce productions. This may

sound like splitting hairs, but in fact there is a major difference. Verdensteatret never presents you with a ready-made meaning, but

rather shows the production of a meaning. By setting a large-scale, unstoppable play of references in motion, Verdensteatret lays the

groundwork for meanings to develop.

Verdensteatret’s audiences are never presented with a finished expression, but are witnesses to the creation of an expression. And

because time, space and the viewer are drawn into the production, there is always an element of coincidence – the final expression

is produced by a game of chance. But as in Schöffer’s ballets of light, or in John Cage’s happenings, or Alexander Calder’s mobile

sculptures, chance is always dependent on one strict condition: the rusty mechanics of the machine.

Verdensteatret takes from the world of avant-garde theatre the idea that art should come into existence at one moment, only to disappear

the next. But the idea of the perfect moment, which was so defining for earlier generations of avant-gardists, may have fallen by the

wayside. Instead, disappearance is made a part of appearance. Verdensteatret’s art is always erasing itself, which is why there are so

many historical references in their work. Therefore their work pays defiant homage to artistic production: a production that creates no

stable values, but which instead chooses to cultivate moments that should really not be cultivable.

One of the less successful operations in military history was the Charge of the Light Brigade, known from Tennyson’s poem of 1854.

In glorious and flowery language, Tennyson describes how 600 soldiers obediently rode into a valley brimming with soldiers and

cannons, in order to capture those very weapons. Heart-wrenchingly heroic, too, his portrayal of the few soldiers who returned from

the jaws of death. But the loss of so many lives was of lesser importance than the greater purpose of war – aesthetics.

The history of art is full of similar Light Brigades, charging heroically through reality in search of the perfect artistic expression, a

pure aesthetic moment that by its own momentum, and only lightly armed, can withstand the chaos that presses on it from all sides.

Verdensteatret understands that such moments can only exist as they dissolve. We will never return home, we will never charge through

the valley. Everything that exists is scrap metal and abandoned battlefields, packed bars and sunrises over the fjord.

On the screen at the back of the stage, Vietnam’s peaceful landscapes meet ancient portrayals of the triumph of death in Europe. Among

Brueghel, Bosch and the long-beaked masks of plague-doctors, we also find Paul Nash, the First World War soldier who painted barren

and desolate landscapes at the front-line and gave them such titles as We are making a new world. Bitter, ironic, but not without hope.

It is in our meeting with dissolution that we can begin to pick up the pieces, and construct fragile fictions against the wall of chaos.

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“I am trumpeter Landfrey, one of the surviving trumpeters from the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava”. Just imagine, for the

sake of poetry, that the old soldier has put on his uniform as he stands bent over the instrument. “I am now going to sound the Bugle that

was sounded at Waterloo, and sound the charge that was sounded on at Balaclava on that very same Bugle the 25th of October 1854.”

A woman interrupts to tell us that the recording is being made at Edison House, on Northumberland Avenue in London, and that the

date is the 2nd August 1890. Then we hear a rusty fanfare. Trumpeter Landfrey disappears back into history.

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When the university lecturer closed the door behind him, he left behind a lot of confused students. One of them was me. Twelve years

later, I found these lines in a book – I like to think that he mumbled them to himself as he grinned broadly and smoked his cigarette:

“From what source things arise, to that they return of necessity when they are destroyed; for they suffer punishment and make

reparation to one another for their injustice according to the order of time”. (Anaximander)

Translated by Alison Bullock Aarsten.

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