The Cut - Esse est Percipi

The Cut - Esse est percipi - A ten-part suite for theatre by Tore Vagn Lid/Transiteatret-Bergen

Through ten movements in this scenic suite one searches along the strategic axis of the polite terror: What is possible and what is not possible to express or to say in a talk show – or for that matter- in a theatre room? What language, what line of argument and what tones or sounds do not survive the time censorship of the ratings – or the forces of gravity of the cultural industry? Where is the true line drawn for how intimate an intimate interview can be?

A suite for theatre based upon court composer Robert de Visée’s suite in D-minor (1684) I would think that most of you who read these lines, have walked into this theatre in order to ‘watch’ a piece of theatre – and rightly so. It should, however, be said about this episode that it might as well be a piece that should be ‘listened to’- written as a duet between the music in the theatre and the theatre in the music. In this way the performance sings as much as it talks, and listens as much as it shows. The Cut – Esse est percipi is, in this manner, maybe theatre spelled with a lower case t, and at the same time a concert spelled with the lower case c: A brief and reflecting contrast to the noisy cultural industry in Walk Cat, Walk! – Final Cut (ep.3), and the far more dark and monumental undertones of the cliff-hanger Neither Victim nor Executioner – Expanding the Battle Zone (ep. 4)

When I for this episode have chosen to transform the baroque suite form into a theatre form, in a dialogic relay between Thiorba, Baroque guitar, actors, singers and loudspeakers – it is due to the same motivation: A small suite by Robert de Visée – court composer of Louis XIV -”The Sun King” – does it really exist under the pressure from the late romantic grand sound ideals of the present classical music industry? The tiny timbre of the instrument, the prudent dance-movements with their strict formal and rhetoric rules – made not just to tell one great story, but rather to tell several small stories! Does it still have anything to tell us?

By making the scenic episode into a silent suite for theatre – I hope to let these voices (if only for a few moments) be heard once again. In this way they are also connected to traces and ´documents´ from other forgotten (or perhaps actively hidden?) parts of a near - but more and more remote past; from the old logos of the disappearing North-European welfare state to the flickering and lost colour nuances of the super-8 movie. At the end: A waving goodbye from the fading 70ies, and in the expanding blue heaven a great pub quiz is waiting for us to arrive.

Tore Vagn Lid

Source: Transiteatret-Bergen, transiteatret.com, 01.08.2010, http://www.transiteatret.com/essesheet.html