Grete Indal, Klassekanpen, Oslo, 08.11.1999
"Timless echoes and shadows"
Régla is an exuberant compilation of sensuous material. Scenic pictures arise from the white installation/room, cutting the minimalism and attracts attention with its organic forms. Surrealistic furniture-like forms covered with shells and corals in heaps as if retrieved out of the ruins of an abandoned manor or shipwreck. Video pictures of traffic-filled streets and graveyards are projected across the white furniture forms and create dark shadows that move the scenic images. Whenever sound, light and image melt together, the scenic picture breaks loose from the performers' control and transform the stage to a steaming and breathing organism. Régla has its own life in a fertile expression that grows and develops new images and associations in a simultaneous dramaturgy. The logical linearity of time is transposed and creates fleeting fictional spaces that play with each other and create a scenic world making ones gaze constantly shift focus. The episodic narrative structure tones the story down and lifts the manner of narrating. Situations are built up and are disturbed by speech, images or movements, and the focus thus shifts. The attention in the performance is turned towards the small details, the unmotivated acts and the external interruptions. Such a dramaturgical "defocusing" in which linear and logical ways of thinking are abandoned, allow for a release of energy and inspire thought processes. Details disturb the performers and divert attention away from the action. Indistinct voices layer themselves over the movements and multiply the focus of the performance. Régla conveys clear references to visual arts. The simultaneous dramaturgy leaves it up to the audience to choose how to combine the various impressions into a whole. The loose dramaturgy causes the eyes to coincidentally dwell upon elements of the image and shakes up the interactive relationship between audience and performer. The audience observe the performers as they construct the images. The performers appear as themselves, they shift between addressing the audience or totally ignoring them. In Régla an intercultural landscape is reconstructed. Musical movements and historical textmaterial melt together into a theatrical hybrid of cultural elements and historical events. The performers find themselves in a no-mans-land and look back across epochs and geographical associations in an attempt to retrieve memories of what has been lost. The material moves across large geographical areas and transform history and tradition. Words are thrown out and return as echoes of colonialism and war, revolution and freedom. The focus is spread out over a multitude of apparently coincidental expressions, movements and moments, as footprints in the sand. Funny images turn to torture and abuse in visually explosive scenic images. The performers keeps energy constant in an unending stream of impressions that grow and decrease. Moments pregnant with visual noise lift the pressure and develop beautiful evocative parts. In a scene where the performers play on glasses the scenic image is frozen, the video-images of a graveyard are superimposed on the installation and the sound from the glasses turns into a concert for the dead. In the tension between harmony and dissonance the vague passages between freedom and lack of freedom are manifest out in intense moments before they are erased. In Régla Verdensteatret moves from the more analytical focus of earlier works and opens up for sensory depths with layers of information that the audience must decode on their own. sThe scenic flora of the performance fascinates, entertains and stimulate the intellect. Régla is strongly recommended