En Ramme for Nostalgi* (A Frame for Nostalgia)

A meeting between a dancer and a piano player is the foundation for the production En Ramme for Nostalgi* (A Frame for Nostalgia) by Haugen Produksjoner. Eventually complexity grows and through video the audience gets to meet two other characters and two other generations; the young piano-playing boy and the elderly woman who dances. The piano is eventually ribbed of all its mechanics.

Stories sidle in and out of each other and reality is shaken. The piano and the dance make up the language uniting and pointing out the stories: The elderly woman who dances again after 50 years, does she tell the same story as the younger woman onstage? Which 20 years of a person’s life are the 20 most important? And how can one change the past?

En Ramme for Nostalgi by Haugen Produksjoner was supported by Arts Council Norway, the municipality of Tromsø, The Fund for Performing Artists. Producer support 2010 was given by Dansearena Nord.

Source: E-mail from Haugen Produksjoner, 13.2.2011

*Not yet translated into English. The title within parentheses is the Norwegian title's literal meaning.

"Liv Hanne Haugen performs with great authority, has a stage charisma anyone can envy and she creates a nice dynamic throughout the performance which rooms both poetry and expressive energy. (...) The music is a chapter of its own. It should alone be enough to make everyone who is concerned with contemporary music to attend the performance. Frederik Croene treats his manhandled piano in a convincing manner, and creates music it’s exciting to listen to. At least as important is it that he and Liv Hanne Haugen together create music and dance working as a tight and intense unit, standing firm as a mountain."
Review by Helge Matland, Bladet Tromsø, October 16 2009, rating the performance worthy of 5 dice pips.

"Liv Hanne Haugen has used her wise imagination to create something different from what I have seen onstage earlier. When the artistic expressions of dance, film, music and poetry melt together it can be a genre-defying experience. (...) So it was when Liv Hanne Haugen, living in Tromsø, brought the piano player and composer Frederik Croene to her home town. Even with a piano that is literally plucked to pieces can give off music interacting with dance of enormous range – from the sensitive, that will blow its way out of the straitjacket to the wild and beautiful which is a tribute to freedom."

Review by Bjørn H. Larssen, Avisa Nordlys, October 16 2009, rating the performance worthy of 5 dice pips.

"Dancer/choreographer Liv Hanne Haugen is a remarkable dance artist making remarkable productions. The performance En Ramme for Nostalgi* (A Frame for Nostalgia) is no exception. From the cautious, trying movements she examines the axis of the body and the direction of the room to a growing degree. The sequence in which she dances out of the white blouse, as if it was a safe straitjacket, is both nasty and funny. Here Liv Hanne Haugen demonstrates her comical talent, which I remember from the production Lag (2006)."

Some thoughts by Elin Danielsen, performing artist/dance student at UIT/Sidsel Pape, October 17 2009

*Not yet translated into English. The title within parentheses is the Norwegian title's literal meaning.