Stavanger Aftenblad November 7 2020
In the beginning there was darkness
It’s striking how much is lost when everything is visible
In ‘Trust me tomorrow’, latest production by the renowned Verdensteatret, long and sometimes meditative sequences are played out in more or less pitch black darkness. Strangely, in the darkness, everything becomes so much more clear. Without sight all the other senses are heightened. Like primitive deep sea or underground creatures we are required to activate rarely used aspects of our biological equipment to observe our invisible surroundings.
As one knows a writers style or a painters line, those who saw the previous production ‘HANNAH’ (2017), the last time Verdensteatret visited Stavanger, will not only recognise the group’s extraordinary and progressive spatial strategies, but also know that these have become even more intense and brutally stimulating.
Brutal darkness
To sit in the darkness is a brutal thing, left to yourself, as a repeated, piercing and sore trumpet stab signals that one has to prepare – for “something”.
From an old 16mm projector, animated rocks appear in the background, rotating, tumbling and collapsing into themselves – the start of Verdensteatret’s known theme “the journey”.
The stage is utilising the whole room – objects are on the floor, hanging from the ceiling and crawling up the walls as we see Verdensteatret’s signatures: ordinary and extraordinary musical instruments, magnificent steampunk inspired constructions programmed to produce and distribute sound and image.
‘Trust me tomorrow’ moves from the beautifully thoughtful, through the weirdly funny, to the insisting and annoying. We travel from the blackest black to blinding stadium lights, from mild silence to total cacophony, while these leaps of expressions still invites investigation and contemplation.
Heightened senses
As previously noted, darkness heighten the senses, enhancing any sudden moves or brief sounds. Something whirls over the audience’ heads. The soft sound of bird songs in the summer fills the room and soul with ease, but transform into annoying insect-like sounds and ends up as the buzzing from high voltage transformer in the rain. Sounds we know intimately, but at the same time carrying a message of something alien and unnerving. In the dark, the meeting with the unknown and indescribable increases the sense of unease.
The piece is a hybrid of genres, as are the different components. Sounds that seemingly originates in living organisms – like a body breathing – morph in a seamless way into mechanic and/or high-tech artifacts. It is as if we move from the ancient sound of the universe to a minimalistic scene of science fiction.
Sudden lights
The room is abruptly lit by flashing lamps that blinds us and the world becomes opaque and impossible to cut through. In the short flashes we see people move through dark and light, reminding us of old silent movies in which the world goes up in flames and disappear in uncontrollable spasms. But there is nothing that separates us who observe and the actors on stage. We are in this together, trying to navigate the blinding darkness, there is sound and music and movement and light from every direction, and in the end there is only one's own experience, memories and emotional baggage, that decides what sequences and elements one reacts to.
Of course one tries to explain what one sees and experience, as the needs for understanding and control is strong with homo sapiens, so one keep hanging on to the ability to observe and analyse for as long as possible. But if we manage to break free from this impossible attempt to make sense of it all, and rather trust the most primitive of senses, then the result is submerging oneself in a warm bath of sensory satisfaction.
Wordless communication
Verdensteatret continues to operate outside all established genres of art – a low-tech audiovisual music performance theatre, utilising items like coffee grinders, trumpets, ostrich feathers attached to mechanical arms and luminescent boxes filled with glass and tinfoil to bring us back to the beginning of the universe and onwards to an unknown future.
Though the piece is without spoken words, the somewhat surreal and confusing sounds and flashes seems to be an attempt of communication. Are the beautiful fireflies attempting a sort of morse code? And maybe the atonal trumpet stabs is primitive version of the light organ in ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ (1975)?
‘Trust me tomorrow’ might be seen as the helplessness of humanity, fumbling around looking for substance and meaning. Maybe, in time, we will develop new senses and better forms of communication. But do we have to? Maybe we will know tomorrow. In that we trust.