Springnight

In Passage Nord's catalogue the following is written about Springnight:

"A story about two young people alone at home in a lonely house on a spring night. A car has a break-down close by and the house is occupied by a family in the process of disintegration. A woman gives birth, another dies, a man drives into the house, a young girl resembles the dream of the boy in the house and has the same name. An elderly man is filled with anxiety and guilt and the young girl in the house feels drawn to a taciturn, war-damaged, middle-aged man. In the course of a spring night, the young people encounter most aspects of life through the chance people who have sought shelter in their home.

The visuals are made up of stylized forms representing a house, a forest and a snake hillside. The house is a frame, the image of a house, a contour, without rooms, walls and roof. A grey wall-to-wall carpet lies both outside and inside the house, dissolving the separation of outside and inside space, it becomes both carpet and grass. A forest in the background consists of tarpaulins with cut-out trees, so that the actors moving about in the forest may still be seen, for example, only parts of their bodies in the back-lit forest. A hillside of snakes is made to look like an exhibition, a scientific arrangement of white pillars with large jars of snakes in water. The adults want something from the young ones, they need help. There are dangerous undercurrents of eroticism, of endless earnestness, longing and hope. "You can manage more than you know yourself. Everybody can", says the woman pretending to be lame in order to punish her husband, to the young boy, because she needs him. Three generations of men, three generations of women.

The spring night gives a forewarning of the way things can go with the young ones if they follow the same path as the grownups, if they also arrive too late in life, if they loose contact with what lies deepest within themselves, if they put off what they should have done in relation to their fellow human beings, if they isolate themselves.

In "Springnight" life is revealed as being infinitely enigmatic, temting, irrational and full of wonder. While nature is liberating and threatening at the same time. Happiness comes in flashes, when one person meets another, or when a person experiences himself as part of the wonder, in nature. No moral exists, no ideals, no truth, but a deep visionary understanding of the incomprehensible."

Excerpt from the script:

"Almost nothing needs to be said when one have eyes, and when one has one's own song."

"I have become part of it. It is late evening. The light will be the same all through the June night. Men with pale faces are coming here across the fields and nobody knows what has happened. No, it is not like that either. Nobody here in the neighborhood will sleep tonight. It is now it begins."

Source:

Catalogue, PASSAGE NORD 1986-1996. Kjetil Skøien, performance, installation. Donated by: Kjetil Skøien, May 2010. Translation: Ruth Waaler.