TSALAL

Advanced Theatre at Black Box Theatre

Review by Bengt Calmeyer. Dagsavisen 17. jan. 2002


Even though the background for  TSALAL  is a journey – this certainly isn't an ordinary travel description. Still, this obsessive performance takes on the theme of travelling. The language is incomprehensible, the images are flickering and apparently without connection, but we're left  exhausted and happy after having experienced the strange, the frightening, and - to our eyes and ears – the almost crazy of the journey itself.

It's like poetry by Supervielle or a painting by an early Dali. It's about a meeting one can sense is so right you can feel it all the way into your spinal marrow.

Verdensteatret has done a marvellous scenic effort. This is an equilibrate performance where advanced technical possibilities have been used, both visually and audibly, in "the characters" appearance - recognizable, yet still poetically unfathomable  and almost fatalistic.

The figures come and go, almost as in a slow film, and this calmness in the performance enhances the haste in the journey (further, further!) that the projections against the back wall gives the impression of.

Like taken out of a dream, a set of strange balloons with long cords float around on stage, directed by a man who, with a pair of scissors in his hand, cuts from the cords and has as his only mission to control them.

The sinister contrast is a big black bird. An unspoken threat, moving endlessly slow and with many stops, gazing at people with an evil eye. Symbolically, you can see many different things in this black bird, as well as the balloons. Death and life, crime and decency. As theatre this works, and that's the meaning of it."