crox 497. A project
by Oona Libens (BE/lives and works in Malmö, Sweden) and Teatro Dondolo. Performers: Eirik Vindgren
(NO), Mia Lundholm (SE) and Oona Libens.
Multimedial puppet theatre. Shadowry, film projection, taped music and live performance with
musical saw and trumpet.
Two
voices: the French one is a lady's voice, fluid, vague, clattering; the English
voice, a British gentleman's voice, clear, enunciated with consideration and
without unnecessary haste. First comes the lady's voice, often ten to fifteem
seconds after the start of the fragment before it gradually disappears under
the gentleman's, which comes and seduces the audience into the depths of the
ocean. The contrast between the timbre of the voices is fascinating. The
French, female voice as liquid and fluid as the water that drowns the male one
that goes straight down, unmoved and with a lightfooted and syncopated balance of
beginning and end of each message.
A film fragment in
black and white follows the credits. The coast line at the altitude of Senja,
north of the Lofoten Peninsula. At the end of the fragment, the male voice goes
under. Four fragments follow: the crawling, hurried life under the surface (sea
horses, moluscs, mussels, a shoal of herrings, shrimp) and the zone just below,
shady and shadowy, with sea urchins and other ocean dwellers chimerical,
prickly, sinewy. The third level bathes in the darkest depths where no sunshine
penetrates (spooky fish, medusas), and below the deepest deep is another depth
where a monster of unimaginable and terrifying size roams, the kraken of old
stories, the gargantuan octopus, below which, the sailors, the captains and
boatswains who sleep in the turbid dust of the ocean bossom and dream of their
legendary women. This spectacular prefomance has an unlimited variety of
techniques. It shows brilliant mastery in form and content. It moves, it is
gripping, buoyant and well considered in all detail. Logically, nine times in a
row, a standing ovation follows.
13 - 16 May
2015. Two performances on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday; three on Thursday.