The Hedda Award 2019

The award goes to an audiovisual work that is not just an effect, well integrated in the performance, but also an active co-performer and deliverer of terms. The work ranges from the fully staged and directed to experiences of losing direction in one's own life. Moving from the created, studio-inspired stage design as framework, to a scarred quarry, the award winner manages to enter and create cosmic and human universes- as an innovator in his field.

When we know the basis for a production, we tend to think that we also know what to expect. But then theatre may surprise us completely and let us experience what we know as if we had never seen it. Daring effects can turn terribly wrong, but they can also at times give us art experiences of extraordinary quality. The director who gets the award has managed the extraordinary. Not just in his treatment of the text, but also by, down to detail, driving the production in waves between poetry and raw realism.

When one stands the most alone and lacks power the most, only the biggest issues remain. In this state, depending on the role, we find an actor who manages to transform from play to play, and who, in this particular instance, combines unpolished daredevilry with poetic beauty and daring humour. He is a master of detail, and he uses his full register and a director's finely painted vision to penetrate the role's complex being. From a fully personal perspective he conveys the mysterious wisdom that anchors the play's grandiose, yet sombre undertone, in stoic naturalness, untameable even by dearly bought historical experience. This way, he creates a tight and literally fabulous net of animal brutality and human folly, alone onstage in an unforgettable double role.

Gender identity and men who, in different ways, suppress women are among the characteristics for the nominees in the best leading actress category. Life's dark sides are illuminated through strong emotions and sharp texts. This year's winner brutally confronts men, the society and herself. She is repressed, but she wants to be at the centre in a performance filled with irony, humour and raw, uncomfortable presence of bitter truths. In every way bared, she conveys the role's agitations and self-consciousness with genuine musicality in text, tone, gaze and movement, and she owns the production from start to finish.

The Hedda Jury has made notice of the fact that many of this season's productions have a political slant, in which the messages are snuck in sideways and appeal to the audience's emotions rather than screaming out loud. This year's best production for children is also an example of this.

It takes use of sound, lighting, costumes, masks and stage design in a way where everything is experienced as new, filled with expectation and life, despite the darkness looming behind, around and above us. The theatrical meeting in itself lets us withstand the evil surrounding us.

The stage effects are beautiful and they are used so dynamically naturally that one may first experience them as simple. When the history unfolds, the body is the first to notice the effect of the elegant combination of puppetry, physical theatre, storytelling theatre and the strikingly alive stage design. In thread with the textual material, the performance conveys how to find hope and comfort in sombre times. The adults who have exited this performance for children sobbing are not few.

Creating theatre that meets youth on their own terms, while sharing wisdom about the many hard choices that, regardless of perspective, characterise the transition between young and adult, is an art. The production that has impressed us the most unites great ambitions and intimate details, and it manages the deed it is to connect difficult and significant themes to the individual, and to thoughts about value in oneself and hope in the future. And this without losing sight of its audience. We are drawn in, into delight and entertainment, but to a larger degree we are informed and mentally beaten by a coordinated ensemble's original, shocking and exciting dissolution of space and limits, between individual decisions and group mentality.

The award is given for a visual whole which in a sober way gives voice to all of the venue, while giving a point of focus to the performers and the audience through a near minimal turning point. Life's vulnerability is caught through a love story, and the main installation of the stage design functions as a screen for the surroundings and the process of life, and for central symbols in the performance, such as a heart, a butterfly and a musical conductor's podium. Effects from silent movies is given expression in simple and at the same time elegant, partly over-dimensioned costumes and impression-rich use of masks, and when the orchestra eventually unfolds as props and an active part of the action, the palette for the graphic notation is shown as life and love itself, going beyond the predictable.

The award is given for a visual whole which in a sober way gives voice to all of the venue, while giving a point of focus to the performers and the audience through a near minimal turning point. Life's vulnerability is caught through a love story, and the main installation of the stage design functions as a screen for the surroundings and the process of life, and for central symbols in the performance, such as a heart, a butterfly and a musical conductor's podium. Effects from silent movies is given expression in simple and at the same time elegant, partly over-dimensioned costumes and impression-rich use of masks, and when the orchestra eventually unfolds as props and an active part of the action, the palette for the graphic notation is shown as life and love itself, going beyond the predictable.

The award is given for a visual whole which in a sober way gives voice to all of the venue, while giving a point of focus to the performers and the audience through a near minimal turning point. Life's vulnerability is caught through a love story, and the main installation of the stage design functions as a screen for the surroundings and the process of life, and for central symbols in the performance, such as a heart, a butterfly and a musical conductor's podium. Effects from silent movies is given expression in simple and at the same time elegant, partly over-dimensioned costumes and impression-rich use of masks, and when the orchestra eventually unfolds as props and an active part of the action, the palette for the graphic notation is shown as life and love itself, going beyond the predictable.

It happens that an actor's efforts first fill the venue, for so to stick to the spectator's consciousness for the times to come. The actor we are now talking about is a uniting force in any meaning of the words, teamed up with his fellow actors and going beneath the skin of a text conveying endless love and as endless despair. Without fear, he removes everything that is unnecessary, to reach the core of what he wants to convey. He shows an incredibly finely tuned understanding for tenderness and consideration, without grand gestures beyond those mourning, anger and lack of power place on a person who helplessly, from the side, tries to grab hold, in full knowledge that the grip will slip. This way, the role becomes an example of how theatre can be liberated from filters and illusions and become a stage for the reality the play gives a voice to. His intimate performance of a father, next-of-kin, is disturbing for the actor as well as the audience.

This year's best supporting actress is visible in every way - a colleague who in force of being exactly that, a colleague - contributes to the weight of the performance. In the role, and as a performer, she significantly influences the development of the main character. With fine details and timing her presence is strong, convincing, quiet and down to earth, in a performance circling existential themes such as the relationships between family, friends and partners. She belongs among the great performers in the Norwegian community of actors, regardless of role, and in this performance, she switches effortlessly between being a grown-up woman and a young man.

One may think that one of the theatre's most important missions is to provide a stage for stories that are rarely heard. Besides, the stage gives a special option for concentrated listening. And this is at the centre of this year's best text for the stage: We are invited to meditate on stories from lives that seldom reaches the attention in a noisy contemporary age. This year's winner uses the tone of personal confidence. The material is documentary - poetically and exquisitely treated, yet still down to earth and without fuss in its presentation. Through careful retelling of everyday situations, the text gives space to many layers of subtext. The text is in tune with the performance's subdued, witty and finely adjusted effects, and this way we get close to individual destinies while zooming out at world politics. This combination of intimacy and distance, poetry and politics, humour and sobriety, and the insistence of beauty in what is not spectacular, make this year's best text for the stage a moving and important text with potential for recognition, nuances and understanding.

The Hedda Committee’s honorary award is a particularly prestigious award, and this year it goes to an instructor for his significant work as a director in Norwegian and international theatre and opera.

His fearless signature has inspired colleagues, given audiences rich experiences and put Norwegian performing arts on the map. His knowledge is massive, and he is massively uncompromising. With characteristic temper and deeply human insight he has gone to war with small and larger ensembles, old and new texts, and a wide range of spaces, genres and expressions, over and over again, Many have experienced how they could go further than they thought they could under his artistic management.

In his work he has been significant for the development of Norwegian director's art and the position of the profession in relationship to the drama text. He has the courage to think big and anew. In the space where we now are: For instance through the giant project Merlin and The Bible. As artistic director at The National Theatre he was enough of a visionary to establish The Ibsen Festival.

The Hedda Committee would like to pay tribute to Norwegian theatre's legendary bad boy and distinguished patriarch, Stein Winge.

Good theatre is a fine interaction of several artistic genres. The season of 2018-2019 has offered several productions in which the relationship between the different elements have been well balanced, and each and every one of them has been expressed without dominating, but instead supported the whole. The production the jury has connected the most with excels in great originality and good acting, by using the space in a distinct way, through a very original stage design, powerful lighting, very conscious use of video, and music that perfectly matches the theme and visual style of the performance.

The special artistic achievement award goes to De Utvalgte for the production The Ship – Vol. 5 Short cuts.

The award goes to a brutal and poetic, comical and ominous, deeply human performance. In play between roles and identities, authenticity and theatricality a multifaceted, confronting and distinct expression is created. The site-specific gives the basic characteristic for a life in movement, a changing society, and the performers behind it examine the human space between hubris and powerlessness, extreme privilege and extreme exposure. The audience is brought along on a shared examination in a myriad of lived life, imagination and myths creating and being created by our lives. The angle that characterises the company, examining, challenging and without prejudice including, also makes it mark on this production. In a filmic expression the seemingly everyday is anchored in mythical material with room for the unpredictability of the human journey. In its deeply moving work this year's special artistic achievement award-winner embraces both hyper-realistic horror scenarios and spectacular beauty, and the whole of it is made with artistic fingerspitzgefühl, humility, authenticity and a level of ambition that is rare.

The special artistic achievement award goes to De Utvalgte for the production The Ship – Vol. 5 Short cuts.

The award goes to a brutal and poetic, comical and ominous, deeply human performance. In play between roles and identities, authenticity and theatricality a multifaceted, confronting and distinct expression is created. The site-specific gives the basic characteristic for a life in movement, a changing society, and the performers behind it examine the human space between hubris and powerlessness, extreme privilege and extreme exposure. The audience is brought along on a shared examination in a myriad of lived life, imagination and myths creating and being created by our lives. The angle that characterises the company, examining, challenging and without prejudice including, also makes it mark on this production. In a filmic expression the seemingly everyday is anchored in mythical material with room for the unpredictability of the human journey. In its deeply moving work this year's special artistic achievement award-winner embraces both hyper-realistic horror scenarios and spectacular beauty, and the whole of it is made with artistic fingerspitzgefühl, humility, authenticity and a level of ambition that is rare.