Tilvirkelsesmaskinen
Verdensteatret, Konsert for Grønland,
Black Box Teater
4 - 6 mars, 2004
by Jon Refsdal Moe www.kunstkritikk.no 12.03.04
I
called Verdensteatret to ask for pictures from the performance "Concert
for Greenland". Instead they sent me a drawing. The drawing is
approximately 80 years old and is made by the artist from Greenland, Kärale
Andreassen. It represents a "tupilak" who tranforms himself into a
seal. The drawing neither documents nor illustrates the work we saw at Black
Box Theather last week-end. Still, they did send it to me, and I therefore
suppose that it has something to do with the perfomance. I am just unsure about
how.
This
is approximately how I feel about writing about the performance. Rarely have I
experienced that my words have been as inadequate as they are now. It is long
past the deadline, I have sorted through my CDs, drunk coffee and condemned
spring. I have postponed writing for as long as possible, because I didn't know
what to write about "Concert for Greenland". However, I think it is
among the best things I have ever seen.
When
literary people wish to legitimize the surplus of their own medium on the few
pages we like to call the critical public life, they usually refer to the
clich³ that audiovisual art forms are less suited than literature to be
mentioned by the literary genre cultural journalism. Art is too difficult to
write about, according to the dogma, because art is not already writing. We who
already write about art have already esposed this argument as nonsensical, a
poor strategy to cover up the lack of competence as well as interest. We use to
say "just write" and by doing that we have contributed towards
developing a discourse that may be marginal, but nonetheless intelligible. In
Norway you will find contributions to this discourse on these pages.
There
are moments, however, when this discourse is inadequate. At times we face an
experience that does not deal with the parameters with which we usually
categorize contemporary art. Concert for Greenland produces such moments, when
art ceases to be a catalyst for further critical reflection, and instead turns
into an esthetic experience in its own right. Conceptualization may only follow
such an experience. Much of the critical discourse during the last few years
has been about deconstructing the idea of such an experience. If we blindly
trust this idea it could well be that we let ourselves be seduced by the
sophisticated emotional kitch rather than having had an experience that
transgresses words. But, most likely it will not matter. And independently of
whether it can be called a legitimate esthetic experience or not, the
performance made my hair stand on edge for two ours.
The
manufacturing/production The main exhibition at the Finnish Kiasma of the
summer of 2003 was called Future cinema. The top floor of the Art Museum was
dedicated to the "cinematic imagery after film" , as it was presented
through a selection of invited artists of the new media. As is customary
whenever we celebrate the future, the exhibition already seemed outdated: the
new media already didn't seem very new, and the revolution their art work was
expected to present was put on hold due to overworked servers and sweaty
VR-helmets. Rather than being filled with fascination about the possibilities
of the future, we faced the art room more with wistfulness about the many
stories about it. And we were irritated by the many stupid things that didn't
work. Maybe the curators had foreseen this, because in the entrance lounge they
had placed two art works by the German Werner Nekes: Film before film and Media
Magica. They consisted of a total of 8 hours showing time on six videoscreens
in which the artist showed his collection of live pictures from the last 500 years.
Somewhat remote, yet not totally without pride, like a drawing teacher who
tears apart a model torso, Nekes showed various devices that once had been
cutting edge technology. Camera Obscura, shadow theater and magical lanterns
meeting the somewhat outdated "futuristic" masturbation on the top floor and
created a beautiful metaphor about the fascination with anything new. More than
a traditional display of new and hip esthetics, Future Cinema was above all a
tribute to the artistic activity: to the practice that somehow persists and
that transcends all contemporary discourses. By contrasting many presents and
future , the performance paid a tribute to what remains in art, independently
of which narratives with which we choose to confront it: namely the production/
manufacturing itself.
I
do mention this because of course a similar effect comes into being in
Verdensteatret's "Concert for Greenland". It is precisely when I' am
confronted with this production that I as an observer loose my language, that I
literally become speechless, because the production doesn't ask for a
commentary from me. It doesn't need an observer in order to gain importance. It
simply shows me something and my job is only to see.
The
machinery.
On
an enclosed stencil the performance presents itself as an
installationconcertperformance. It is an appropriate term, but not a good word.
I think I shall rather call it a machine. And the people on stage are operators
more than performers: their presence as humans is completely subordinate to
their contribution to making the theater machine work. Thus the aspect of the
"showing" is duplicated in the theater-situation. The operators are
not on stage to display themselves, but to show something else: namely the
theater machine, and how it functions. Through an insanely complicated, yet
naively simple system of rails, electro-acoustics, sound samples, video
projections and shadow pictures they put in motion the machine. Every picture
and every movement is duplicated and cast around in the machine. The shadow of
the hand that starts the mechanical process falls on the videoprojection next
to it and together this creates a totally new picture. Rusty mechanics meet new
technology, and once again manufacturing in this art work comes into sight .
This manufacturing does not claim anything back from the observer and it
transcends all the stories the observer may be capable of telling.(the devil
should be a metaphysician).
The machine works for
around one and a half hour. I don't think I can tell how it works. I wish I
were able to say that this work has to be experienced without having it sound
like a cliche. However, I end up with a clich³; I believe this is a work of art
that has to be experienced.
SHADOW IMAGES: Shadow theatre is a dominant element in
the performance.
A totally peculiar theatre experience
Theatre/audiovisual composition
"Concert for Greenland"
Verdensteatret at Teatergarasjen
BERGENS TIDENDE. Published: 05.
des. 2004, 06:00
Fascinating
and kind of beautiful, but don't ask what it means!
It's
barely possible to reconstruct or to exclude any pure meaning in the
performance. However, "Concert For
Greenland" contains some interesting and unusual elements which simultaneously
are theatrical and resist theatricality and which in an unique way unite
traditional theatre with modern painting, video, shadow theatre, music and
"driftwood" art.
It's
just so God damn hard to sum up!
But those who are open minded, don't need any recapitulation.
It
says in the program that the performance is produced after a journey
Verdensteatret made to Greenland last summer. The experiences and impressions from the journey have been
tossed and thrown about, put through the dream-machine, made the unconscious
work freely – for subsequently to let the material loose in front of the
audience in the form of a concert-installation-performance. Scary and praiseworthy!
Freely spoken, the references to
Greenland are both vague and few.
The videocuts from Greenland could just as well been recorded in the north
of Norway, and the strange, fable-animal-like figures and installations which
play a key-role, reminds us only modestly about the magical figures which the
inuits for years have carved out of whaleross-bone and other materials.
Neither
that is important. What counts is
the imagination, the associations which are put into play and which the
audience is invited to play along with.
You might not leave the theatre as a wiser person, but lots of questions
will definitely hover around in your dimmed brain. Dimmed by deafening sound-attacs, video-projections, speech
which can't be caught (even less be understood) and other sensuous assaults.
It's
"driftwood" art Verdensteatret expose us for. And we are invited into the artists' process. Similarities and differences come
drifting, some elements may be used, others must be rejected. Finally we are confronted with
something I can't put into word.
General parts of the performance
are concentrated around the figures or installation which dominates the center
of the stage and which is ritualistic, a quality the constant rotation of some
of the figures amplifies – while others are manipulated by the
performers, back and forth like in a hockey boardgame, simultaneously our
fragile ear-drums are menaced by the cacophony of sound/music.
The
room is filled by sound images, which more or less transform into visual images
and subsequently turn back to their original form. Everything interferes, new constellations of sound, image
and movement arises constantly.
Intelligible
connections don't exist, we are meeting changing tableaux. By quite simple projections against the
white back wall something which reminds us of good old shadow theatre are
created in a unique landscape of light and sound.
A
colourful, rotating, kind of garlandy installation is projected against the
wall accompanied by a melancholic, lingering music, almost a piece of elegy,
while the figure on the wall constantly changes in shape and its size is blown
up until it so to speak faces it's own deconstruction.
Beautiful,
perilous, peculiar. Most likely
you have never seen anything like it.
It would be a pity if you missed it.
REVIEW BY
JAN H. LANDRO
The Other Theatre
Verdensteatret
"Concert For Greenland"
Dagbladet Saturday 4th. of December 2004
An
important and beautiful, visual theatre experience.
By Andreas Wiese
Today and tomorrow Verdensteatret visit Bergen
with their performance "Concert For Greenland". The performance is based upon journeys the ensemble made to
Greenland, The Faroe Islands and Iceland
during autumn 2003.
Verdensteatret was founded in (has
existed since) the mid 1980s. Asle
Nilsen and Lisbeth J. Bodd are both key-members of the ensemble.
Their
productions may be characterised as performance, installation and theatre simultaneously,
and the artistically expression is much closer to visual art than traditional
theatre.
This
is also the case when it comes to "Concert For Greenland". On stage they have built a machinery,
simultaneously ambitious and primitive, a kind of hi-tech driftwood technology
which creates a theatre-machine, a machine the performers operate, as they
simultaneously become a part of the installation.
The
sound-images floats or thunder synchronously with the visual images, while
fragments of dialogues can be heard, but nothing like a dominant linguistics
rhetoric. Images are projected at
the back wall, all intertwined with the stage-machinery which are constantly
moving, where shadows, projections and visual echoes create a room the audience
can contemplate, meditate upon.
The
final result is impressing. It's
like a Japanese butoh-performance where the performance creates its own room,
its own time – and its own distinctive stage-expression.
Boats
force themselves through the ice, conquering the endless ocean, while the people, calmly and concentrated,
keep the machinery going. Images,
such as video-sequences of people against waving ocean, open for parallel
associations to powerlessness, and exploration, inferiority and simultaneously
conquer. Until the images at last
ends up in a beautiful projection of a sculpture filmed at the back wall: the
three-dimensional artwork re-created on a two-dimensional surface.
It's
hard to describe the effects of a performance like "Concert For Greenland", but
it leaves behind a feeling of obstinate hope in the frost.
"Concert
For Greenland" is thoroughly thought out and successful, and there's no doubt
that Verdensteatret is an important contribution to the theatre, an expansion
of what can be communicated from a stage, and how to do it.
Strangely
beautiful
By Hilde Østby,
Dagsavaisen, 6 Mars 2004
Verdensteatret
"Concert for Greenland"
Artistic
direction: Lisbeth J Bodd and Asle Nilsen
Black Box
Theater
"Concert
for Greenland" is a beautiful performance, a concert in which sound and image melt together into a
higher entity.
The productions
by Verdensteatret are characterized by fragmentary images and texts that
nevertheless in a strange way have an inexplicable connection and a strange
beauty.
There is no
narrative that binds the tableaus together. On the contrary, it is more like a
broken/interrupted journey. This time Verdensteatret has been inspired by all
corners of the world: Beograd and The Faeroe Islands, ice cold Greenland and
Tibetan monk songs.
Lisbeth J Bodd
and Asle Nilsen, the artistic direction, organizing an anarchy of various
artists in all kinds of genres, explored in TSALAL from 2002, "the sound
art" which resulted in an invitation to the new music festival Magma in
Berlin.
In "Concert
for Greenland" they explore this further. On stage there are weird
figures, made of bones, feathers, nails and glass that may remind us of
shamanistic ritual artifacts. When the contributors on stage move the figures,
they give off sounds and thus an ice cold and beautiful soundscape emerges
which consists of violin music, dog barks, technorythms, fragments of insects
and voices far away.
At the same time
projected film-fragments shows ships ploughing through icy waters while the
sound figures on stage also cast shadows on the wall behind them and thus
create a kind of shadow theater.
Verdenstreatrest
intensely mystical and beautiful production are like bits of a very old film in
a langugae pieced togheter so that the plot disappears.
The result is
strange images, fragmentary dialogues and a very elaborate and interesting
soundscape.
"Concert
for Greenland" is a very beautiful performance, a concert where sound and
image melt together in a higher entity.
This is an
esthetic experience one only understand if one experience it.
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