In Performing Precarity we have been working with several composers staging projects that enhance unstable situations on stage. For Berg & Høeg Fotostudio (2023) I composed the music myself. In this exposition I reflect upon experiences from the process of creating and performing the music in improvisational dialogue with my collaborators in Theater Corpus. What ideas and work methods are available to me in the encounter between puppets, actors, myself and my instrument? How can themes and experiences from the research project Performing Precarity inform the work? My reflections deal specifically with the music, despite the fact that the music clearly cannot to be separated from the whole setting. Many thanks for permission to use our material in this exposition; Tormod, Aina, Tuva, Ragni and Daniel.
PUPPETS AT THE PIANO
The dolls in a puppet show can move about in ways we humans can only dream of. They can soar through the air and rotate their heads 360 degrees. The dolls are vulnerable because they are dependent on us to be given life. This vulnerability becomes extra apparent when a puppet is lying lifeless in its box backstage or is being operated in a manner that is too over the top, careless, or in ways that work against the puppet’s characteristics. I feel tenderness for the marionettes in a puppet show, perhaps the same tenderness as I did for the dolls I used to play with when I was small, they were my children. They say that playing with dolls teaches you to feel empathy.
Berg & Høeg Fotostudio by Theater Corpus/Tormod Lindgren is a puppet play about the couple Bolette Berg and Marie Høeg running a photo studio in Horten around 1900. In daytime they took ordinary portraits of the people in the village, at night they worked with experimental art photos that they hide in a box marked 'Private'.
The following reflections are solely based on creating and performing the music for the play.
Concept, director, scenography, puppets, documentation: Tormod Lindgren.
Script: Aina Villanger.
On stage: Ragni Halle, Tuva Hennum, Daniel Frikstad, Ellen Ugelvik (EU).
Costumes: Thale Kvam Olsen and Tormod Lindgren
Composers: Béla Bartók, Frédéric Chopin, Agathe Backer Grøndahl, Leoš Janáček, Ellen Ugelvik.
Light: Erik Spets Sandvik.
Producer: Tormod Lindgren / Syv mil.
Art painter: Leandro Cassiano.
Scenography assistant: Aaron Lindgren.
Parts of instrumentarium and extended pedal created by Christian Blom. EU preparing for Beauty I-X by Janne-Camilla Lyster at Dansens Hus, Oslo. Photo: Janne-Camilla Lyster, still from videodocumentation by Marte Vold.
I arrive at the rehearsals dragging huge suitcases full of objects, small instruments and microphones. This suitcase instrumentarium has been assembled over many years. Working inside the piano involves a particular kind of tactility which feels to me very different from traditional keyboard playing. I come in contact with ways of playing which intersect with other instruments’ sounds and playing techniques. By laying horsehair or nylon thread under the strings and pulling them back and forth, a string sound can be generated. You can play with different types of percussion beaters on lengths of wood or the piano body like a drummer. Pizzicato movements with your fingers on the strings is reminiscent of classical guitar-playing.
I gain access to all the parts of a piano, the body and its internal mechanism, the strings, tuning pins, soundboard, case, screws, bolts and the wooden frame itself which is the skeleton of the entire construction. When I let my nails scrape carefully over the ridges on the bass strings, it’s like scratching your scalp. The palm of your hand stroking the smooth yellowing beams corresponds to the feeling and sound of stroking my little son’s silky cheek. These are the kind of bodily movements that produce sounds I can use which I believe can contribute to making the puppets in the performance come alive through this sonic landscape. Inside the piano body I discover noises resembling heavy breathing or vocal sounds. And also sounds that might be made by animals and birds. When I attach flower stems with rosin on them and pull and bend them, I can create bird sounds, twittering from small birds or the sigh of a larger one, or it might be someone crying, or a voice calling out to us, the sound of searching, longing. I use this technique for ‘The angel child’ in the video example below, music for the little puppet who symbolises the child Marie and Bolette dreamed of but never had.
Click on the picture below to watch and listen. Photo: Tormod Lindgren.
It is tempting to imagine that every component I play with inside the piano’s case has its own history. That each object means something special for me and was perhaps picked up in an obscure foreign antique shop, or that they are valuable heirlooms. Or that the things look especially attractive, as if they could be puppets in a puppet show themselves. It’s only partly like that. As in a puppet show, I manipulate the objects with my hands on my miniature stage – the piano’s resonant case – with a similar sensitivity, dexterity and empathy as a puppeteer at work. But I never try to hide the objects I am using from the audience; whether it’s something as ordinary as a dildo or a spray can, it is allowed to be just that, fully visible, just they can sound however I want them to.
When you play a note on a piano key, that note will gradually become weaker and eventually die away. And a piano tone is naturally ‘straight’, meaning that by default it has no vibrato. Inside the piano these ‘laws of physics’ can be reversed and you can play around with the expectations of what a piano can produce. This emphasize the possibilities of something 'unrealistic', witch lies implicit within the art of puppet theatre.
In search for humanized sounds I tested different sound-scapes and tried them out toghether with the ensemble to see if there was something in the music that could help the puppets in their movements.
The working methods I used during the preparations and in the performance are closely connected to the overall thinking behind the Performing Precarity research project. I wanted to create situations in which it’s possible to deal with whatever crops up in the instant of performing and use it, knead it, reshape it. I want to know the qualities of the unexpected things that can happen, precisely because that kind of situation reflects life itself, where nothing ever goes to plan but we have to live with whatever happens anyway even if we can’t control it. This corresponds with playing with objects inside of the piano that I have not fully mastered; these objects can surprise me. I plan a process with a large element of improvisation, in which objects and instruments are selected, but I can use them in different ways, combine them and create a process as I go. These working methods do something for me. I experience an increased level of awareness and presence within myself in the moment in this semi-improvised setting.
Click on the images below to watch and listen. Photos: Tormod Lindgren.
The term precarity can be understood as a kind of vulnerability or frailty, for example being dependent upon something or someone to stay alive. This chimes with the situation of puppets in a puppet theatre. You can easily throw the puppets against a wall or turn their heads all the way round. If the puppets are operated with a lack of feeling or empathy, if they are moved too quickly and haphazardly or much too slowly and stiffly, they lose their believability. The puppets depend on their puppeteers for their impact. The same thing applies to a piano. In order for the instrument to have life and convincing power, it needs to be manipulated. And if you for example take away the instrument’s legs and place it on the floor, its symbolic authority is weakened; a shiny memorial to the music of the past. Without legs, the piano becomes something else, perhaps a fragile shipwreck.
Sound engineer Asle Karstad to the left and I preparing the grand piano for a performance of Darkness I-IV at Dansens Hus 2020. The scenpography was later totally changed. Photo: EU
The piano can be transformed by being built on and extended. When I use my extended sostenuto pedal, the visual impression of the instrument becomes altered for the audience because the piano’s appearance has changed. A long thingamajig has appeared, attached to the pedal rods and stretching across the floor. And even more dramatically: the pianist has moved from her usual position at the keyboard to a standing position in the bow of the piano body. This transformation creates at the same time an increased possibility space for myself who is making the music. Now I can get closer contact with the inside of the instrument without having to bend over from the keyboard end. And from where I am standing my arms can reach everything that is inside the body of the piano: its flesh, muscles and blood.
The piano is a proud monument which puts in a great deal of effort. Before we knew where the premiere would take place, I toyed with ideas about how the piano could be a part of the scenography in Berg & Høegs fotostudio. Tormod bought some large, old fashioned cameras, as tall as a person, for the performance. I also wanted the piano to look like such a statue, and be a part of the interior together with the stylish furniture, mirrors, floor-standing lamps and the beautiful backdrops. That neither the piano, the music or myself would be divided from what was taking place onstage as an accompaniment, but that we were an integrated part of the action in which both puppets and actors could perhaps also use the piano as they wandered around, handling the cameras, lenses and darkroom equipment. I wanted us to play together as an ensamble as for example, in the dance performance Mørke I-IV, in which the dancers attached long nylon threads to the underside of the piano strings and pulled or danced the threads back and forth between them in pairs. The piano was transformed to a kind of spinning wheel/spider web or a gigantic horizontal octabass with impressively beautiful and powerful stringed sounds. Or, as in UTFLUKT, where we used both the underside and top of the piano which was our float, with Jenniferx lying underneath and playing underwater sounds upwards to me while I was sitting on top of the float playing sounds downwards to her, an exciting tableau in which we stretch out to each other and improvise together through the piano’s sound board. Perhaps the piano could be a miniature stage/performance space as in Kristine Tjøgersen’s Piano Concerto? In which the piano’s resonating chamber is transformed into a forest of miniature trees which you can play by rubbing the tree trunks and crumpling the foliage.
The scenography needed to fit Gamle Raadhus Scene where the premiere took place. In the room there is a small stage where the grand piano is placed, seperating me and the instrument from the photostudio that Tormod sat up on the ground floor. We discussed how I could blend in as a character due to these conditions. The solution was that I came down to the photostudio from my position to 'have my picture taken' in the middle of the play. We also worked with subtle bodymovements and how to direct my gaze towards the actors from where I was placed. Unfortunately, the grand piano got a bit 'lost' in the total view, and I hope we will get the chance to do a version where I am part of the scenery like in the informal house concerts that were common in the times of Marie and Bolette.
EXPLORING POLYPHONY
The Ghost, Tuva Hennum and Daniel Frikstad in the darkroom. Click on the picture below to watch and listen. Photo: Tormod Lindgren
This is the darkroom scene in the performance. A strange ghost glides weightlessly through the room. This phantom explains what technically goes on in a darkroom and the magical qualities of a camera; that the device can capture a piece of time cut from the flow of life. He recites a text:
The physical world is presented to us in all forms of organic and inorganic material in an endless variation of phenomena. And no matter how durable the material is, its form will always be in a state of change. Change is an important word when thinking about the camera’s aura. Some people talk about pictures, others talk of spirit, but (whatever school of thought you follow, you know that) the camera captures the world as it really is: As a captured piece of time cut from an endless stream of events and movements. Yes, cameras create a connection between the visible world and the world we cannot see. That which is hidden, that which we dream about, that which we have never yet imagined, maybe a world which is a little better for us women?
The darkroom scene is one of many obscure scenes during the performance. The ghost describes ice cold technical facts about working in darkrooms, but also shares some of its philosophical theories on change, hidden dreams and fantasies of the future. It confirms the existence of many worlds. It is as if the puppet wants us to lose our footing, what is spoken is a mixture of fact and fiction which only partly disturbs the performance’s narrative. All while he (or she?) is flying around restlessly to and fro in the red light. The puppet theatre has this advantage: the ability to confuse us by creating obscure, impossible situations in which the puppets, perhaps in ghostly form, hover weightless in front of us and we find ourselves listening with deep concentration to what this absurd, see-through figure has to say. Now you just need to keep up.
Another exciting directorial strategy in the performance was that the actors were dressed as puppets – or vice versa. For example, Tuva Henna and Ragni Halle operated the puppets Marie Høeg and Bolette Berg at the same time as playing the two photographers as actors without any puppets on their hands. The Shakespeare magazine describes this doppelgänger effect like this: ‘In this way the company mixed abstracted events with the aid of objects, with real acting work between the actors. A kind of magic realist universe, in which materials and people gave life to each other.’
Ragni Halle and Tuva Hennum as Marie Høeg og Bolette Berg. Photo: Tormod Lindgren
Different kinds of doubling, magic, ambiguity and metamorphosis ran through the entire performance. We alternated between the horizontal narrative, which was biographical material about Marie’s and Bolette’s lives from around the early 1900s, and abstract tableaux with no story or dialogue. Strange figures appeared, were photographed by the women and then disappeared again, never to be seen again. The actors played with gender roles, Marie dressed up as a man and Daniel Frikstad, as Akseli (the photo studio assistant), was given a lovely women’s outfit like the one worn by the man in the iconic photo lying concealed in the box marked ‘private’ in found in Marie’s estate after her death. The stage was constantly changing with different apparatus, lenses, lamps, furniture, mirrors, photos and screens were wheeled in, set up and taken away again. We moved back and forth in time via the use of quotations from various musical styles by composers such as Bartók, Scriabin and Backer-Grøndahl mixed with the soundscapes I had created and improvised around. The geographical location of the narrative remained unclear. When were we in Finland, Hungary, Horten, or in the Gamle Rådhus Scene in Oslo? Was the year 1920 or 2023? By staging spiritualist seances of a kind that was common in Marie’s and Bolette’s time, the company also moved evenly between our world and ‘the other side’, between two realities.
For me, the piano’s sonic potential also contains a kind of doubleness, it is as if the instrument consists of two different spheres. The sound and the actual feeling of playing the keyboard with all the immediate historical connotations which go with it are experienced differently and more concretely than the sound and experience of playing inside the piano’s body, which is a much more open and ambiguous universe where apparently ‘everything is possible’.
Photo: Berg & Høeg. Preus Museum.
Up to now, I don’t think I have managed to make a music that combines the two soundworlds. I have either sat on the piano stool and played on the keyboard, or stood in the curve of the piano with my extended pedal and played inside the sounding-box with different objects and instruments.
The traditional keyboard-based piano sound can almost count as a cliche when you have worked with keyboards all your life. The sound of just one individual tone, an interval or a chord can ‘trigger’ familiar musical works from the popular repertoire in a pianist’s body. A breath and a soft Bb1 leading to either a G2 or just parts of an Eb minor chord are all it takes to get the feel of Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 9 No.2 (1887) and I am back where it began: as something good or bad, or at least something unknown, on the edge of an abyss. Heavy velvet curtains and dentures removed and replaced while I’m playing. A world of musical performance which stimulates the imagination of a child to think of another time when everything was beautiful: the scent of perfume, extravagant candelabras, delicate teacups, powder, wigs and tragic tales of love.
Nevertheless, on rare occasions something might surprise me about the sound of a keyboard and pull the rug from under my feet. Helmut Lachenmann creates an extraordinary polyphony in his Serynade (1997-98) for solo piano. Serynade consists of two different pieces of music overlaid on top of each other. A set of chords and individual notes are muted with the aid of the fingers or the piano’s middle pedal – indicated in the score by diamond shaped notes. I think of this layer as a kind of shadow music barely audible in the background somewhere and which occasionally rises up during short pauses in the sequence. At the same time another piano music is playing over and around these silent chords, indicated by normal musical notation, a music which is clearly audible, more outgoing and contemporary. For a pianist, playing two musical pieces seamlessly over each other demands an incredible virtuosity, as the shadow-line’s silent structures must be organised and kept low at the same time as the freely ringing piano music is played out with clear timbre. And the result of the polyphony itself is remarkable since it is impossible to perceive both of the musical pieces at once, it is as if you have to choose one of the layers and concentrate on that. Or that you let go and allow a third music to come through, a music which is a personal combination of what you take from the two layers and experience from this mode of listening.
What kind of experience might crystallise if I was to follow through on the idea that another music might emerge than the one we actually hear, as its own layer within the whole? And how might I make such an experience possible? Simply by playing chunks of Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2 I want to examine whether our memories or experiences of this piece can be evoked and replayed internally. Whether our earlier experiences of the Romantic style can generate a separate layer, a shadow music, in the polyphony of performance. By making music partly unrecognisable I hope to active us as listeners, make us create our own relationships and connections instead of passively listening to to an almost entirely played-out canonical piano work from 1887. I don’t want to play the Nocturne as Chopin wrote it, but as a reinterpretation where we search together through the shadows 150 years later for what this music has meant to us and what it releases in us today. I prepare all the keys that are used in Nocturne no. 1 on the piano. This results in some notes sounding in a totally different register or with a different pitch if I place a magnet on a string and strike the note on the keyboard. I place small metal bowls on the G2 and Ab2 strings which are central melodic notes, and stroke them with my fingers. They make an unexpected vibrato, delicate and fragile. Some of the prepared notes, on the other hand, just sound like dull hiccups or drones of something vaguely similar to the original piano note. I play what it says in the score, but now it sounds only partly like Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2. It sounds like a cross between perfume music from the Romantic era and plinky-plonk music from some weird skronk orchestra in 2023. I play the ‘correct’ notes on the keyboard, but they sound like something else than just ‘wrong’. Despite playing in a Romantic style with masses of rubato, it sounds more like contemporary music. It’s a strange experience which I enjoy and experiment with for some months.
Playing with polyphony in Berg og Høeg Fotostudio is interesting in relation to the theme of the Performing Precarity project. In the research project we are exploring what can happen on stage when ‘mastery is off the table’. We want to emphasise qualities we feel can be found in the unpredictable and uncontrollable, those traditionally undesirable elements in classical music performance. We create the conditions for live situations in which we performers ‘receive’ what happens on stage rather than try to repeat something as perfectly as possible and keep things under control. In any case, we can of course never control the audience’s experience of the music or the puppetry. But by presenting ‘skewed’ layers on top of each other, or something that is apparently ‘unfinished’, I hope that together we can actively create relationships in the moment and thus take collective responsibility for what happens on stage. Maybe new and unforeseen connections can occur? What would happen, for instance, if Chopin’s masterpiece was played along with the cripple, the most defective puppet in the show? Captain Prebensen has lost both his arms and has a wooden leg. He has a cantankerous look in his face, with piercing eyes, and appears haughty and aggressive in the photo studio. But when I play fragments of Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2, he slowly starts dancing. It’s as if fragments of the experience are now trickling through the Captain. Fragments of sounds he has been surrounded by; gently rolling waves and a creaking hullunderfoot. Perhaps he is dancing a sense of pain about something, what is it that has happened to his body? The Captain pirouettes with the tip of his wooden leg and glides breezily across the floor. The combination of different elements is interesting, his hard stare contrasts with something softer in the music, his deformed body reacts intuitively to fragments of something in the old composition, and he becomes suddenly elegant and gracious.
Captain Prebensen and Ragni Halle. Click on the picture below to watch and listen.
In dreams, we touch on something in the subconscious and wake perhaps with a strange feeling of having gone through a kind of experience. What happens if I dream myself into being Agathe Backer Grøndahl, a woman who made and played music at the same time as Marie and Bolette were running their photo studio? Can I experience something that affects the music I am making in our performance today and how I chose to play? Thale sews an outfit with a historically correct, figure-hugging skirt and matching blonde blouse, I pin up my hair and put on tight, elegant boots. I practise playing in the way we have learned was normal at the time Agathe was active as a pianist, with plenty of rubato.
Friends and colleagues gathered at the 1898 Bergen festival (left to right): Christian Cappelen, Catharinus Elling, Ole Olsen, Gerhard Rosenkrone Schelderup, Iver Holter, Agathe Backer Grøndahl, Edvard Grieg, Christian Sinding, Johan Svendsen, and Johan Halvorsen. http://www.bergen.folkebibl.no/arkiv/grieg/fotografi/stor_musikkfesten_bergen_1898_gruppe1.jpg.0
Agathe must have been a unique role model for many in Marie and Bolette’s time, and to a great extent she still is. She was a world class pianist who had studied under no less than Franz Liszt himself. She was a composer with almost the same status as Edvard Grieg in a male-dominated classical music milieu. At the same time she was the mother of four children. During her education she was advised to avoid music because she was a woman, but Agathe did not let herself be put off and was determined to follow an artistic career. She has left us more than 400 compositions. Her scores give us a unique opportunity to investigate her artistry and musical thinking. I am getting to know her through playing her music. I play what she played, note for note, my fingers replay things that she invented and wrote down more than 100 years ago. Exploring by playing gives you access to elements which are difficult to put into words other than describing or analysing a musical structure, a playing style or a biographical history. I experience something of Agathe’s subconscious when I enter into her music. The unconscious plays a natural role in the choices we make in any creative process, the parts of the choices which are intuitive or which arise out of physical experience gained during a long artistic life. Via her scores I come into contact with fragments of how she listened at? that time, in the compositions are experiences from all the music she had studied and performed, music she liked and was inspired by, how the sound of a word in a text resonated in her, spontaneous ideas she may have had, what condition she was in, her sensitivity, concentration and awareness of what was happening around her. At the same time Agathe’s art comes back to me, a pianist today, and all my experiences and thoughts, my preferences and all the music I have experienced myself, as well as everything created in the time between her death and now. Our hands in each other’s.
Imagine Marie and Bolette humming Agathe’s beautiful melodies while working in the photo studio. With their regular female voices they imitate the deep vibrato of famous, trained singers, they laugh and flirt, gesticulate, maybe they forget bits of the lyrics and hum the rest together, do their best. Classical ‘romances’ were the popular music of their day, and music made by a woman was rare – it probably would have made a strong impression on these photographers who were also women’s rights activists. And Agathe worked with texts that were subtle: secret things, hidden, unsaid, things not supposed to be revealed. In Marie’s and Bolette’s time, lesbian love was so unthinkable that it wasn’t even criminalized, but the photographs they preserved marked ‘Private’ speak for themselves: their gender role-play and lesbian erotica was something they kept to themselves, they knew that these pictures had to be kept secret. Camilla Hambro analyses one of the romances we use in the performance suggesting the way of life at that time: 'To the Queen of my Heart (1872) becomes relational in the context of the body, the erotic and the sensual. To love that song is to risk ‘the philosophy of the night’, but also the erotic body, the philosophy of love – a consolation fantasy perhaps, but one that is specifically embodied for a user in the 1800s. Going silently out in the night and the secret-filled darkness to whisper was not on everyone’s agenda'. (Hambro, 2017).
Til mit Hjertes Dronning by P.B. Shelley, transl. to danish by Caralis
Skal vi vandre en Stund
I den dæmrende Lund,
Mens Fuldmaanen hist holder Vagt,
Jeg vil hviske, min Skat,
I den kjølige Nat,
Hvad jeg aldrig ved Dagen fik sagt.
Jeg ved Stjernenes Skjær,
Skal betro Dig en Hær
Af Tanker, som aldrig fik Ord,
Imens Nathimlens Glands, Som en straalende Krands,
Om din luftige Skjønhed sig snor.
Og naar Maanen fra Sky Over Marker og By
Udgyder sin sølverne Flod,
Vil mig fængsle dens Skin
Paa din Pande, din Kind,
Vil jeg knæle iløn ved din Fod.
To the queen of my heart by P.B. Shelley
Shall we roam, my love,
To the twilight grove,
When the moon is rising bright?
Oh, I’ll whisper there,
In the cool night air,
What I dare not in broad daylight!
I’ll tell thee a part
Of the thoughts that start
To being when thou art nigh;
And thy beauty, more bright
Than the stars’ soft light,
Shall seem as a weft from the sky.
When the pale moon beam
On tower and stream
Sheds a flood of silver sheen,
How I love to gaze
As the cold ray strays
O’er thy face, my heart’s throned queen!
Oh, how beautifully they do it, Tuva and Ragni, and how brave they are, just like Bolette and Marie were. We choose types of tones which lie on the edge of their registers and I challenge them to explore how much time they can take between the lines by laying back on my accompaniment while we are rehearsing, where is the borderline at which the phrases start falling apart? And how lively, and at the same how ‘everyday and casual’ can we manage do make it, by slackening the apparent ‘tension’ in the score? We make a little duet at the end, in reference to present-day Netflix musicals which are so popular now, in which the characters, in chorus, suddenly burst into song.
It’s uncomfortable playing the piano while wearing clothing from the early 1900s. The boots are narrow and I lose my contact with the stage floor and the pedals. The skirt lining cuts into my waist and inhibits my breathing. The blouse is tight under the arms and my tied-up hair makes me feel silly. Generally I feel it’s boring to hear about other people’s dreams and I myself have only had different types of nightmares over the past 20 years, which are still inside me with a murky greyness when I wake up, and which I try to get rid of as quickly as possible. My subconscious is disturbed. As the 1900s playing style begins to settle into my body, I must go on. I practise splitting up the two piano systems in the scores vertically, in other words so that my two hands do not ‘play together’ at all any more. I add ‘off’ notes to the chords and extend them in long movements and registers, beyond the scope of the score. I sing in a high falsetto romansene while accompanying myself, with extremely long glissandos in my vocal leaps, make recordings, listen through them and try again. Heavier rubato, longer breathing spaces. It seems like when I take away the parts of the score which have the typical repetitive rhythm of that era, the ‘period’ feeling is destabilized. Tormod wants to have a musical interlude in which Marie and Bolette travel across the sea in a little boat. I’ll leave it at that: waves crashing over the keys, improvised and asymmetrical, breakneck and breathless. A stream of roaring harmonic waves partly built on the chords from To the Queen of my Heart and at the same time resembling a composition very close to my own heart: Øyvind Torvund’s Plastic Waves. I let the piano waves continue washing into the romance as Tuva and Ragni begin singing, I want the water to soak into the paper and overflow, uncontrolled.
Click on the photo below to watch and listen.
ENDING
I want to end this reflection with expressing my deepest gratitude to Tormod Lindgren for inviting me into his project and giving me the opertunity to share his documentary material in this exposition. Along the way I learned a lot about puppetry getting access to Tormod's large archive of material and his own expertice as artist, director, puppeteer and craftman. His strong musicality and musical ideas are part of the sounding material for the play.
I always rely on a bit of luck in my life. Maybe that is a result of working with the themes in Performing Precarity; to be able to welcome the fortunes that come along my way, counting luck in as part of the picture? In this cooperation luck kicked in manyfold shedding light on themes of the research project.
Improvisation was something that I initially wanted to explore through Performing Precarity. The way we worked in Berg & Høeg Fotostudio opened up that possibility, both in my own solo work by the instrument and in the work together with the actors. Tormod and the ensemble were a dreamteam to work with, giving safe space for experimentation. The overal theme of the play, Marie and Bolette's life and art, shed light upon the vulnerability of a life situation where two women needed to hide their artistic expressions and their secret lovelife for the surroundings. Trying to play out in music their vulnerability and at the same time incredible human strenght, provided an interesting artistic challenge. Aina Villanger's spiritual texts paved the path for my own investigations of polyphony leading to new artistic insights. And the main characters, the puppets, inspired me to think and act in a new way by the piano, trying to soar through the air... For the first time I felt that I could listen to historical music through the lense of contemporary piano techniques, and construct a fragile bridge between the two.
Ellen Ugelvik, 11.08.2023
REFERENCES:
Bowles, V. et al. (2009). Wild Tree. Bergen: Hordaland Art Centre.
Fischer-Lichte, E. (2014). The Routledge Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies. Overs. Arjomand, A. Oxon: Routledge.
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Hambro, C. (2017). ‘The Intensity, the Passion Can Smoulder beneath the Surface’ – Text meets context in Agathe Backer
Grøndahl’s romance To the Queen of my Heart. Studia Musicologia Norvegica, Vol. 43, Utg. 1.
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MUSIC/ART PROJECTS:
Backer Grøndahl, A. (1872). Three songs 0p. 1, No. 3: To the Queen of my Heart. Libretto by P.B. Shelley.
Bauckholt, C. et al. (2022). UTFLUKT.
Bartók, B. (1915). Romanian Folk Dances. Sz. 56.
Bolleter, R. the well weathered piano. Filmed and directed by Robert Castiglione. Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/455140930
Bolleter, R. Secret Sandhills. YouTube: https://youtu.be/LyAdritKdT4
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