The patient

In the Passage Nord catalogue the following is written about The patient:

"A grave field from The Iron Age outside of Sandefjord is the arena for the performance. The grave consists of eighteen stones in shape like a boat, the highest are more than four meters tall. In the middle of the boat shape one found a burned body and a number of bear claws. What has taken place as Heathen cult and sacrifice rituals one can only imagine.

The production was performed around midnight in the month of June. The audience sat on balls of straw in a slope. The texts are written by Tor Ulven and found in six of his books.

He questions science, archaeology. Can one date what is found? Or is the metal ring she lost last summer already an artefact?

A number of visual elements made of our time's materials; plastic, aluminium and other industrial products are treated by the performers in a visual, non-illustrating theatre expression, in which dance is a main element.

Two male actors and two boys perform the texts, whereas four dancers perform choreography of ritual and expressive nature, often in a form showing humans' interdependency. A Japanese Butoh dancer is the image of the burned body found in the grave. He is like a shadow, not relating to the other performers, but like an incarnation from the past.

In the performance are also thirteen young girls from a local ballet school. They talk in earthy voices and sleep on iron beds, while the Japanese give them heart-shaped white balloons.

The traces, the sliding marks left from the heels of the shoes of him you loved a hundred years ago, are the only things left. A little mouth exits from inside the stone to suck up a small drop of rainwater. And you wait to be excavated. Boat graves sail through the forests. And the boat in the water is dissolved into a tasteless medicament.

Text, dance, sound and visual arts are elements on equal footing. It is about past, present and endless future."

Sources:

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

Kunst1, kunst1.no, 31.01.2013, http://www.kunst1.no/default.pl?showArticle=116&pageId=167