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Lane Czaplinski
Mar 14, 2019
Performing Arts Director Lane Czaplinski shares notes and thoughts from his encounter with the Norwegian company and its intricate multimedia event.
Large white projection surfaces frame a tin foil floor covered here and there with little wired gadgets. They vibrate intermittently, making sounds like two lips pressed together.
A bearded man carries a chair to center and sits. He claps two wooden blocks together, inhales, holds his breath, exhales, moves the chair to a different spot and repeats.
Video plays. It look like an animation of an asteroid burrowing through layers of earth, an ancient Pacman displacing layers of rock and sediment, and making its own kind of petroglyph.
There’s a hum of machinery and echoey concrete punctuated by slams, gurgles and mechanical resonance of increasing intensity. This is the world of Verdensteatret or at least a representation of it in the first few sequences of HANNAH. It’s resolutely theatrical and yet doesn’t really involve any performers. The objects and materials onstage are crude and beautiful. There’s no narrative but somehow HANNAH manages to be about everything.
I cry when I think about their work. How do vibrating gadgets communicate so much?
***
Asle picks up a large squash the size of a newborn and cradles it. We’re sitting on the small veranda of Janne’s cottage overlooking what they say is the vegetable garden of the King and Queen of Norway. I’m with members of the company and we’re trading laughs and stories as the sun descends beyond our lingering smoke and the distant hillside.
Performance number two—the day after the premiere at Henie Onstad (Oslo)—had taken place earlier, which was followed afterwards by a conversation with a group of art students. As an aspiring groupie of the ensemble, I stayed for the chat to drink their free beer. To be respectful, I began taking notes as they introduced themselves.
Note #1
Piotr - visual artist Asle - visual artist Turgin - sculptor Eirik - sound/software Jannes - visual artist/sculptor Ali - actor Niklas - performance/sound
Note #2: attention fatigue
They told the students about returning to the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, where they had made an earlier trip some years before, as part of the process of making HANNAH. They like the idea of doing things together and even doing things repetitively together as a way of combating the attention fatigue that can result from living on an over-industrialized planet.
Later I found a study about the harmful effects of city life on the ability of the brain to focus and remember.
Two control groups.
One walks busy streets; the other walks leisurely in a park.
The street walkers experience cortisol spikes; they lose memory and freak out.
The park walkers develop denser, thicker networks of neurons in the prefrontal cortex and right anterior insula of their brains, and are more chill.
I remember when the co-founder of Verdensteatret, Lisbeth Bodd, first told me about the ensemble’s creative practice many years ago, I thought she was part hippie, part nuts. I remember her describing how they went on trips to distant places and how the effort was never about any particular destination but more about some kind of group mind meld. I remember thinking I didn’t buy it but didn’t care because I liked what they made.
A night earlier at the reception after the premiere at Henie Onstad, a longtime and former member of the company told me how Lisbeth had miraculously hung on in her final days to be present for the world premiere and engagement of Bridge Over Mud, how she used the occasion to say goodbye to the throngs of people who came to see the show as well pay their respects, and how she passed as soon as it all was over. Maybe only the hippie, park walker, artist savant gets to live and die this way.
Note #3: Asle/painter
Asle’s painting studio is located in the company’s studio. It’s down a hallway from a large common space where they are working on HANNAH and is filled with what looks to be close to a hundred paintings. Most of them are quite large, and they’re abstract and loose, and thrilling in their variety. He’s a terrific painter. Asle was also the co-founder of Verdensteatret along with Lisbeth.
I found documentation online of an early work of the company called Onsdag 13 Oktober (1990). Here’s a screenshot from the video:
Look! There are people! Performers! Scenery! The performers say things! They move!
"The World Theater's performance is a scenic composition where each and every element is part of a whole that is difficult to push into an interpretation form. An endless study in scenic rhythm and musicality that should be experienced rather than interpreted."
This text was written in a daily paper in Oslo—the Klassekampen—during what must have been around the time of this show. I think it perfectly captures what Verdensteatret does now. It could also describe Asle’s painting.
Note #4: How to catch a monkey
I remember Eirik talking about "how to catch a monkey" but I couldn’t remember the story and it began to haunt me. I emailed him for clarification and got the following response:
Hi Lane!
Good to hear from, hope all is well in your new job and new city. Hope to be able to visit someday.
Funny that you remembered the story, or remembered that in a way there was a story.
I will try to resuscitate – from whatever remains in my memory-remains – the idea that I was trying to get across to the audience.
The context was the artist talk that we held for the students from the Norwegian Theatre Academy in Fredrikstad.
As I remember we were talking about insistence in working out ideas; the fact that one might clasp on tightly to certain ideas. I have had this image of the monkey trap in my head for some years now, but I can't remember where it came from.
I actually did some research now and found that the origin of the story is from Robert Pirsig's book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and tells the story of a South Indian monkey trap.
It is usually used as parable for clasping too tight to an idea; kind of a coaching/motivational story really.
Here is the part with the monkey:
"[...]the most striking example of value rigidity I can think of is the old South Indian Monkey Trap, which depends on value rigidity for its effectiveness. The trap consists of a hollowed-out coconut chained to a stake. The coconut has some rice inside which can be grabbed through a small hole. The hole is big enough so that the monkeys hand can go in, but too small for his fist with rice in it to come out. The monkey reaches in and is suddenly trapped by nothing more than his own value rigidity. He can’t revalue the rice. He cannot see that freedom without rice is more valuable than to capture with it. The villagers are coming to get him and take him away. They’re coming closer-closer! - now! What general advice, not specific advice, but what general advice would you give the poor monkey in circumstances like this?”
Now this is well and all but in Verdensteatret’s process the moral of the story becomes a bit different so a paraphrase was probably in order. Added to this I didn't know that the trap was a coconut; at the artist talk I said it was [a hole] in a tree. So the story became something about the long meticulous collective work process, where one might find oneself clenching one’s fist in order to get that idea out of the trunk of the tree. Yanking and pulling so hard and intensely over such a long time that you eventually uproot the tree and stand there waving your hands with a big tree stuck to your hand. Now, here is where we welcome the audience.
Something like that I think it may have been. Hope it helps with the haunting feeling.
Best wishes to you Lane!
Note #5: Fuzziness analog to reality instead of fake news Abstraction/how we actually see the world
My girlfriend Lauren, knowing that I either can’t or don’t read, underlined some passages in The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to help give this essay some heft. Here are only a couple of the dozens of passages she marked:
....I stick my neck out and make a claim, against many of our habits of thought, that our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable (improbable according our current knowledge) - and all the while we spend our time engaged in small talk, focusing on the known, and the repeated.
And:
It’s hard for us to accept that people do not fall in love with works of art only for their own sake, but also in order to feel that they belong to a community. By imitating, we get closer to others - that is, other imitators. It fights solitude.
Taleb’s “black swans” are improbable events that are usually random, unexpected and extremely difficult to predict. Examples include the 2008 financial crisis and 9/11. Taleb makes the case that it’s hard to predict the future because we’re living in a wild universe where abstraction and the unpredictable govern more than inference and constructed narratives, which seemed like something I could correlate back to making art and Verdensteatret. But as I carefully unfolded each page Lauren had creased for me to read, I couldn’t really find what I was looking for and even began to doubt the book’s relevance to my subject.
I became curious about what others thought about the book and found a review in the New York Times from when it was first published in 2007. While the verdict was mixed, the review pointed out that the author had dedicated The Black Swan to Benoit Mandelbrot, the godfather of fractal geometry.
I thumbed the pages of the book, the now uncreased pages still discernible in their flattened state and creating an intermittent pattern along the fore edge. Fractal geometry and petroglyphs. Fuzziness. Lauren had been right all along.
Wikipedia says some petroglyphs seem to depict real events whilst many others are entirely abstract. Theories vary to their purpose. A way of transmitting information. Part of a religious practice or ritual. Even though most petroglyphs were created before the occurrence of the first major civilizations, they seem to represent everything by representing nothing in particular. The essence of art. Cognition. Evolution.
I came across this image while trying to figure out how to write about Verdensteatret and HANNAH.
It’s by an artist, writer and curator named Emily Roysdon (designed in collaboration with Carl Williamson in 2009). I was struck by how it sort of resembles the ancient Pacman asteroid in HANNAH. Roysdon writes:
Ecstatic Resistance is a project, practice, partial philosophy and set of strategies. It develops the positionality of the impossible alongside a call to re-articulate the imaginary. Ecstatic Resistance is about the limits of representation and legibility — the limits of the intelligible, and strategies that undermine hegemonic oppositions. It wants to talk about pleasure in the domain of resistance — sexualizing modern structures in order to centralize instability and plasticity in life, living, and the self. It is about waiting, and the temporality of change. Ecstatic Resistance wants to think about all that is unthinkable and unspeakable in the Eurocentric, phallocentric world order.
The wired gadgets and bearded man and ancient Pacman asteroid and mechanical resonance in HANNAH do this for me. All performers and scenery. Verdensteatret creates space for reflection and meditation while communing with others, and the necessary abstract stimuli to conjure mental constructs for codifying or at least negotiating the expansive terrain of our little brains. And because it’s a generous space and the stimuli are so exquisite, the resulting associations and dissociations are exquisite, too.
This is ecstasy. In a theater, nonetheless.
