Silent movie with puppets
& live performance.
Silent movie is made for camera with found puppets from Norwegian Theatre Academy, a former puppetry school, in a small PhD office disguised as a black box, as part of the artistic PhD project on what site and context do to form and content with place itself as the protagonist.
The film is based on Henrik Ibsen's A Doll’s House, and as live performance it's site-based and partly improvised, sometimes as the masquerade ball referred to but never played in the original. Nora enters and mingles with the audience who also play the guests. They drink champagne and eat macaroons. As the evening entertainment is announced, Nora screens the silent movie and performs all characters live.
The puppets are wooden marionettes with worn-out historic materiality, sculptural, beautiful and vulgar, closer to comedy traditions than the bourgeois drama. The film itself is more a baroque cave painting than skilled puppetry. The live performance is entertainment with simple means, but with great engagement. While Ibsen's theme is a woman stuck in an upper-class marriage, this work discusses class and art, its precarity and relation to money, marked and institutions.
Marionettes by Josef Vitek.
Music by Snorre Ytterstad.
Costume by Fredrik Floen.
Masks by Hazel Barstow.
Concept, puppeteering, filming, editing & sound design by Ingvild Holm.
Made at Norwegian Theatre Academy in Norwegian Artistic Research Program.
Performances:
16/3/2023, Teaterfest, Møre og Romsdal Art senter, Molde.
29/9/2022, Høstscena, KUBE, Ålesund.
Autumn 2021, International Ibsen festival, Oslo National Theatre (corona cancelled).
2/4/2020, BIT, Bergen (corona cancelled).
25/1/2020, Norwegian Theatre Academy, Fredrikstad.
24/1/2020, Nationaltheatret, Oslo.
20 – 21/9/2019, Bastard International Theatre festival, Rosendal Teater, Trondheim.
Review (in Norwegian) from Bastard:
'... ei humoristisk, lett naivistisk, og særs underhaldande versjon av Henrik Ibsens «Et dukkehjem», ... aldri har eg sett «Et dukkehjem» så dampande erotisk som denne versjonen'. (Amund Grimstad/ festivalanmeldelse)
http://amund.info/2019/09/bast...
