Director/playwright Eirik Fauske presented Lindås at Black Box teater in 2012,
a piece in which Fauske’s personal history became the starting point for telling tales of family and society. Personal experience is also at the heart of the latest work, Live. In this brief interview, Fauske tells about the process.
“Live is an artistic collaboration that has developed in stages. When scenographer Signer Becker and I performed a version of it during the Fjaler Theatre Festival in 2014, I was grieving. My father-in-law had just passed away, and my mother-in-law was ill. I was thinking about the fragile border between life and death and wrote the text like a diary. Signe introduced me to the composer Camilla Barratt-Due. She had also suffered a loss. The work became a kind of requiem for us.
Since then, dramaturge Marit Grimstad Eggen, light designer Tilo Hahn and installation artist Kjersti Alm Eriksen have joined the project. Their collaboration provides new opportunities to experiment with live writing, scenography and music.
The relationship between writing and reading is interesting. There is something at stake when I reveal the non-linear act of writing to the audience. Each letter or word that I write or delete is potentially loaded with meaning. There are no performers to convey the words. This creates freedom, but it is also demanding.
Some of the inspiration for Live comes from how computer games such as Minecraft generate different worlds that one must traverse on the journey through the game. I am also intrigued by dream visions and poetry such as The Dream Poem, a medieval Norwegian ballad. We can project something or imagine something, but there is a sacred threshold that we, the living, cannot cross. This is an important theme in our process.”
