Amsterdam
is a long way from Vietnam, where the Oslo-based Verdensteatret cross-artform
ensemble revisited after ten years to create HANNAH, their playfully elliptical
fusion of watery-looking visuals, kinetic sculptures and 1950s cartoon-style
soundscapes they bring to Glasgow next week. The two performances of HANNAH
will form part of the fifth edition of Sonica, the Cryptic company’s annual
showcase of international visual/sonic artworks.
Back
in February, however, the morning after the first performances of the show at
the Sonic Acts festival that tales place mainly at the Stedelijk Museum of
contemporary design, the company is feeling the effects of what appears to have
been a pre-Scotland research trip into a Dutch whisky bar. This hasn’t stopped four
of them meeting for coffee outside the museum’s twenty-first century Benthem
Crouwel Wing, a vast building in Museum Square which opened in 2010.
The
cross-generation ensemble who make up the membership of Verdensteatret – it translates
as Theatre of the World - do things together like this. It’s all for the
experience. That’s how they make work like HANNAH, the palindrome of its title
suggesting a journey that arrives at the same place, whichever direction you’re
coming from. While the company resist any kind of literal interpretation of the
work, it seems to suggest the tectonic shifts in a landscape, with video
projections of high rise blocks pointing to more constructed environmental
interventions currently tearing up cities across the globe.
“We’ve
done a lot of research journeys over the years to different places all over the
world,” says the company’s co-founder and longest serving member Asle Nilsen, “and
we thought, what if we tried to do exactly the same trip we did ten years ago,
and see if this repetition has something to offer us. We did this without any
more specific plans than that, just to see what happens when you repeat
something after ten years. So, on the one hand, it’s the same place, it’s
different because ten years have passed.”
The
original trip to Vietnam was to research the show that became Louder, which was
first seen in 2007. This was a large-scale orchestral piece that used
megaphones and a mechanical puppet play to explore the unfamiliar terrain that
inspired it. While Nilsen and company producer Elisabeth Carmen Gmeiner made
that trip, only they and one or two others are still with the company. For
Niklas Adam and Janne Kruse, who joined later, and who both perform in HANNAH, their
first trip to Vietnam was full of baggage not of their making.
“We’ve
always heard so much about it,” says Adam. “Stories about the whole experience,
and what they did and how it turned out, so it felt like something that was
part of our common reference, even though we didn’t go the first time.”
And
did it live up to expectations?
“No,’
says Kruse. “I don’t think so. But not in a bad way.”
“It’s
a mythical place,” says Nilsen, “and you have these fantasies about it, but maybe
it’s not so wild as you imagine. There are big cities all over the delta, and it
was rougher ten years ago. Now, there is more tourism, and the city has around
one million more people in it now than ten years ago. It’s growing very fast.”
Verdensteatret’s
evolution has been more gradual. The company was formed in Bergen by Nilsen
with Norwegian performance artist Lisbeth J. Bodd in 1986 with a more
recognisably straight-forward theatrical approach.
“We
developed the whole group,” says Nilsen of his late co-founder, who passed away
in 2014. “It started in a circus tent, touring Scandinavia in a large old bus.
After four or five years in the tent, we started to do work indoors for the
first time, and the works became more abstract, and more strange, so that
company disappeared, and another crowd became interested, and slowly it moved
into the art world. The first shows were more for the family, with circus acts,
but its changed slowly over the years. We have been into very text based work,
more theatrical pieces, dance and choreography, and then the last ten years
maybe, its more about visual art and sound art. The people too are also
changing, and are from different artistic professions, so that’s also a part of
this ongoing change.”
This
year’s Sonica features forty events over its eleven-day duration, with
highlights including Turner Prize nominated sonic explorer Luke Fowler
performing with hand-built instruments in Hamilton Mausoleum. For Verdensteatret’s
first trip to Scotland, the journey is as important as the performance.
“No
matter where we go on our research journey,” says Nilsen, “maybe the most
important thing is to just do something together, to have a common experience, because
that’s gives us more access to a common language. We store things in the
sub-conscious, and over the long working process it eventually seeps. It’s partly
about trying to reconstruct a memory, and finding out how to translate
something like that memory of a common landscape into an artistic language.”
Going
by the Amsterdam shows, HANNAH is also hugely entertaining.
“It’s
accessible and demanding at the same time,” says Gmeiner.
“The
line I’ve heard the most,” says Adam, “is ‘I don’t understand anything, but I
love it’.”
Where
is HANNAH likely to take Verdensteatret next? Will they make a further
pilgrimage to Vietnam in another ten years?
“That’s
probably enough now,” says Nilsen. “There are so many places. It’s not so
important where it is. It could be at the roadside where you live. Every little
place is interesting. It’s mainly that you do it at the same time. To be in the
same landscape together, it’s an experience.”
Could
the company feed off the Glasgow landscape and make into a new work, perhaps?
Nilsen
nods.
“Anywhere,”
he says.
HANNAH
can be seen at Tramway, Glasgow on November 7 at 7pm and 9pm as part of Sonica
2019, which runs at various Glasgow venues from October 31-November 10.
The Herald, October 31st 2019
ends
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