Various thoughts on the Theatre Festival in Fjaler 2024

This was the 12th theater festival we've had in Dale, and the third year I've been lucky enough to write for young voices. Yay, free tickets! This year I saw many different plays, and have written about some of them here:

Dead as a Dodo:

Wakka Wakka is a group I've seen many times before and have become a big fan of. I saw Animal Riot twice in 2021, and The Immortal Jellyfish Girl (on my birthday!) in 2022. This year they were back (yes!) with the puppet show Dead As a Dodo. 

During the play, I realized that Animal Riot, The Immortal jellyfish girl and this play were all connected in a trilogy (at least thematically). The earlier plays have also been about extinction, climate and the apocalypse, and they have done so in a humorous but thought-provoking way.

The play is about two skeletons (a human and a dodo) who ... well, I didn't quite understand what the main characters were trying to achieve, they were constantly thrown around to new places and characters. But the places and characters were really fantastic. It was a bit like a magic show, really.

"It was probably the most advanced play I've seen at any theater festival here. With very creative and fancy lighting techniques, the play was almost like a stop-motion animation movie. 

In any case, it was a lot of fun, and I hope we have more puppet shows like this in the future!

Epp:

Epp was a play by Theater Corpus based on an old science fiction novel of the same name, and was about the man Epp in a totalitarian future society in the city of Gambolia. 

"It was great to see more puppet shows at the theater festival this year. What's even better is that I think these two plays are as different as puppet theater can be. Where Dead as a dodo was silly, visually stimulating and an almost complete illusion of living puppets, Epp was calmer, relatively simply made, and more inviting to reflection among the audience.

Instead of wearing black suits to make fun of the actors, the group was dressed in yellow work suits. Epp was clearly controlled by the actors "aha! He lives in a totalitarian society, so of course he's controlled...". Although I liked this choice, it sometimes got in the way of my experience of the puppet theater.

The play had a special charm to it. You got the feeling of being in a 60s scifi novel (it sounded a bit like radio theater). It was an insight into this man's claustrophobic apartment and routine, it was a very cool piece to watch.

People of the earth:

People of the earth (La gente de la tierra) by Mezcolanza Theater was a play about a young woman who fled to Norway from the dictatorship in Chile. It was a play with only three actors, but sometimes it feels like there were more than that.

I really liked that almost all the dialog and exposition was in Spanish, with Norwegian and English "subtitles". In addition, much of the "Norwegian" dialog was totally incomprehensible, just an imitation of how Norwegian might sound to someone who doesn't know the language. I felt much more sympathy for what it must be like to have to integrate into a country without help.

In the end, we learned how close, both in time and experience, this story was, and it was very moving. After the lights went down and before the applause, there was another ten or twenty seconds where the entire audience sat completely still. And sniffled. A lot.

My dinner with Putin:

This monologue by Kate Pendry was an insight into the world of acting, and how difficult it can be. It recounted a series of fairly random events that gradually led to the speaker finding himself in Moscow and standing in front of Vladimir Putin himself.

I was very drawn into the story and was infected by the actor's enthusiasm about being an actor and trying to break into the world. This probably made it easier to sympathize with her choice to act in a film made by the famous but notorious Russian film director Nikita Mikhalkov. You could at least understand why things had unfolded as they did. But right at the end came the twist. The story is not finished yet. 

"We start filming in November."

"When I've seen plays where an actor talks about his experience, it's always from a perspective outside the situation. The artist has always had to try to reflect on everything in its entirety, and has then written it into a monologue. That's not the case here. The revelation hit pretty hard. The situation is not over, and things are at least as messy as before. The same can be said about the war in Ukraine, I thought afterwards.

I'm not entirely sure how to feel about the choices that led her to this situation. So a thought-provoking piece. Great fun!

Conclusion:

The theater festival in Fjaler 2024 had a lot of good plays (many I didn't have time to see or write about, unfortunately), and I am very happy that I could "participate" this year as well. Thank you very much!