"CONCERT FOR GREENLAND" is an audio-visual composition where rusty mechanics meet new technology on the backside of a "video-shadow-theatre" on Greenland.

A performance/installation where visual art, sound, video, installation, text and theatre try to unite into one composition.

 

The background for "Concert for Greenland" is a journey Verdensteatret made to Greenland and other north-Atlantic islands in 2003.

Greenland as the focus point of this work is, as often before, a result of an intuitive attitude towards use of artistic material and the fact that research on travels has worked very well for us on several occasions earlier.

The material is based on travels and research around the Northwest-Atlantic countries from august till November –03. -Greenland, Iceland, Faeroe Islands -and Norway.

In the further working process in Oslo all the material collected on these trips went into a deeper artistic process that in the end "sweat out" a poetic concentrate.

The longest stay was in Greenland and has obviously made a deep impression on us since so much of the material we ended up using comes from our travels there.

The ambivalent impressions we often felt during our stay in Greenland has changed into deep fascination.

"Concert for Greenland" reflects this journey on several levels simultaneously.

On the first level it mirrors the actual trips (specially Greenland).

But the structure and artistic expression of the performance is more like images and sounds from the subconscious experience of these Nordic journeys, rebuilt through our dreams or our unreliable memory. On still another level its an expedition through a sound-scape, through language and visual transformations.

Participants in "Concert for Greenland":

Asle Nilsen, Lisbeth J. Bodd, Håkon Lindbäck, Piotr Pajchel, Petter Steen, Ali Djabbary, Per Flink Basse, Corinne Campos, Øyvind B. Lyse, Lars Øyno, Morten Pettersen, Bergmund Skaaslien, Trond Lossius, Erik Balke.

ARTISTIC TOOLS AND MEDIA IN "CONCERT FOR GREENLAND"

With "Concert for Greenland" we have developed a wider range of tools and instruments for artistic expression that opens up new landscapes to explore.

This complex multimedia expression is about to become as one polyphonic instrument which we learn to handle with increasing skills and precision.

This instrument or strange "orchestra" we also call a "live-animation-machine" or "The telling-orchestra". (This has also been developed further in our installation "Fortellerorkesteret")

This "orchestra" has many faces and show itself in many different disguises: as an orchestra, as a polyphonic instrument, as an animation-machine, as a room for transformations.

It is something which has multiple voices, multiple shapes, multiple stories.

The many "voices" of this "Fortellerorkesteret" is all the different elements/medias that is active in the performance. Its "instruments" create sound, images, movements, space, language and stories. It moves from hysterical noise out of control to strict discipline and subtle elegance.

 

The phrase "the telling orchestra" is also chosen because of the many similarities between our methods of working and composers methods.

Today we see our works as a kind of orchestral works, because they are created as a "musical totality". Our works is not music-pieces but musical space-related audiovisual compositions.

This creates a genre we call "The moving room genre".

It can be said that "Fortellerorkesteret" plays works in "The moving room genre"

"Concert for Greenland" is such a work.

SOUND IN "CONCERT FOR GREENLAND".

Our work takes place in the tension between stage-art, visual art, music and sound-art. We often see obvious analogies between those situations we create and installations made up by light, sound, room and video. But unlike the more pure installations which stands "on their own" we want to create dynamic rooms where the persons/participants present in the room is of great importance in making the room come alive.

We want our rooms to have a direction and a development that can make the performance into a dynamic movement through a material.

 

SOUNDPROCESSING OF THE VOICE

Much of our work in this field are research around the musicality of the language on several levels, a kind of electronic "onomatopoeticon"

We are fascinated by the expression we get when the semantic meaning in the language collapses. We have often experienced that we end up with a fascinating rhythmical and tonal sound-structure growing increasingly stronger in emotional quality as the verbal message disappears and the voice blends in with the space.

This have led us in the direction of an irrational language with multiple meanings which can be interpreted in many ways, a different abstract and poetic total-expression.

THE MOVING ROOM

When we show a work we try to bring with us a state from the process where our material stays at the point of becoming something recognisable all the time and at the same time is at the point of vanishing – a state of constant change and transformation.

This " moving room" is created by an interplay between many medias actively operating simultaneously. It is created "live" in front of, or around the audience

By use of several medias simultaneously we can create different times and intensities, different visual rooms and sound-scapes, different perspectives and distances at the same time -in several levels/layers.

The medias carry with them each individual tempo and intensities, and between them we get the interval which create living and moving rooms.

Images where past and present time exist simultaneously, where the chronology is deconstructed where and when it is needed during the performance. Change the perspective between outdoors and indoors, between high or low, narrow and broad or create a multi-perspective.

The images "bleed" into each other from all sides and makes it difficult to decide where the first end and the next begin.

In "Concert for Greenland" the left side of the stage-room is dominated by a wooden construction. This primitive construction is like a shadow-theatre seen from the back-side (the audience is placed on the same side as the figures/objects and the manipulators). The shadows falls on a white wall behind the construction. This construction we call "The Raft"

It is made out of old weather-beaten planks in two levels with a lot of figures/objects placed on it. The objects is shoved back and forth, they rotate and some move vertically.

All objects has their own sounds which is dynamic connected to their movement. The objects is controlled by the people on stage.

 

The shadows falling on the back-wall is further developed by video and other kinds of projections. This create complex images and situations with many layers/depths and perspectives simultaneously.

THE VOICES:

Each object/figure has its own "voice"/sound which consists of its own sound when it is moved back and forth on the wood + samples made specially for each object.

A contact microphone is attached underneath every object/figure which make the "voices"/sounds dynamically in intensity according to how they are moved.

PROJECTIONS AND MIRRORS IN "CONCERT FOR GREENLAND"

In this piece we try to bring the video into a more organic instrument.

To transform the somewhat synthetic appearance of the conventional videoscreen into an image-instrument that we can manipulate direct physically with our hands.