News

The Mariner

 

<<<A room that is doubtless in an ancient castle and that appears to be round. At its centre, on a bier, a coffin holding a maiden in white. Four candles at the corners. On the right, almost directly facing whomever imagines the room, a single window, tall and narrow, through which can be seen, between two distant mountains, a small patch of ocean. Near the window five maidens hold a wake. It’s night and there’s a vague trace of moonlight.

The mariner is lost on a distant island… On this island there were a few stiff palms, vague birds flitting among them…  The mariner had no way to return to her homeland and suffered whenever she remembered it, she set out to dream a homeland she’d never had, to make it so that it was hers, and had always been—a different kind of country with other landscapes, other people, other ways of walking down streets, of leaning out windows… Every hour she built in her dreams this false homeland, never ceasing to dream…>>>

DVELL is a unique improvising theatre company of five artists based in Trondheim, Norway. We work together building mysterious worlds, dismantling them, building them anew using sound, poetry, scenography, experimental writing, performance and visual art. Our collaborative process has grown partly from our individual art practices but primarily through working together over the years exploring a new kind of theatre, questioning what it is to be present on stage with each other. Our performances are both intimate and epic with the visual mystery of arcane ritual and the familiarity of an everyday greeting. Things grow and change like mould, memes, or potatoes.

Our new production is an improvised reading, or translation of Fernando Pessoa’s one act static drama, The Mariner (1913) . The piece is supported by Teater Avant Garden, Trondheim Kommune and Norsk kulturråd.  Teaterhuset Avant Garden

 

 

OLD NEWS……….

Improvisasjon Person

DVELL will be performing our new work Improvisasjon Person at Teaterhuset Avant Garden March 27.- 29. The performances explore improvisation in the theatre using sound, scenography, text, storytelling and ourselves. The new work has been developed from Arild Vange’s book improvisasjon person, the writing of which was influenced by improvisation in literature and music. Vange’s texts respond to poems by Fernando Pessoa and are deeply invested in listening as a ground for poetry. This new theatre production is built around responses and provocations between performers and across the various artistic disciplines of the group. As well as offering a response to the radical propositions contained in Pessoa’s poetry concerning subjectivity and identity the performances of DVELL (which are never the same) ask, what can a theatre be for us, now?

DVELL performances build theatre out of relations. In the beginning the group (then comprising Neil Davidson, Arild Vange, Frode Eggen and Kyrre Laastad) made work that was more suited to a concert situation; sitting down together, focussing on sound and the relation between improvising music and text (and how that text might be written while being informed by improvisation). With the addition of Kristin Lian Berg’s improvised scenography the process has expanded into a more dynamic spatial and visual field bringing forth transitory sculptures, half remembered children’s games, impossible dialogues, collapsed architecture, abandoned noise gigs and myriad forms of translation and transformation. It might be theatre, but the aim is to assemble concrete situations without knowing what they will become or where they have come from. The work invites an engaged audience, one that becomes complicit with our questioning and also notices the alternative choices and paths that could have been taken as much as the ones that are.