The Ballad of Ricky and Ronny

In The Ballad of Ricky and Ronny – A Pop Opera, Anna Sophia Bonnema and Hans Petter Dahl sing to the audience in the guise of their alter egos Ricky and Ronny.

"While in the world outside the machinery of war keeps on turning at full power, these two singing characters, with their naive trust in the manipulability of individual happiness, represent a sense of contemporary life. It is the mindset of the new aristocrats, the nouveau riche, whose horizons are defined by what goes on behind closed doors. They think they have the right to everything, and when life takes a different course they see it as an injustice which they cannot accept. They prefer to escape into a fantasy world where everything is still possible. The glamour of the imagination is maintained to the extreme ", Robert Steijn of Needcompany has written about the production. www.needcompany.org

MaisonDahlBonnema is the name adopted by the duo Hans Petter Dahl and Anna Sophia Bonnema. These two performing artists have since 1999 played an important part in Jan Lauwers & Needcompany’s stage productions. Hans Petter Dahl had previously been a co-founder of and for many years a performer with the Norwegian cult group BAKTRUPPEN. In 1995 Dahl and Bonnema set up Love & Orgasm. Since then they have created ten performances as a duo or with other artists, at the meeting point of composed music, art, literature and theatre. Dahl and Bonnema are constantly redefining themselves: from Love & Orgasm through L&O Amsterdam to MaisonDahlBonnema, which opened in 2003 as a virtual concept establishment that launches new collections of ideas in the form of clothes, music, video and writing.

The Ballad of Ricky and Ronny is brutal, but also cautious, vulgar and sensitive braided into each other, cynical, but at the same time humane, and raw into the poetical. Ricky and Ronny sing about whatever they think of. But this uncensored musical expression doesn’t make them happier. Rather the opposite: The more they sing, the more they lose hold of reality, the deeper are they entangled into their own disturbed minds and the closer do they get to the edge of their own insanity. Their relationship works as a bastion against the evil world outside, but the rot is already visible in the foundation.

The Ballad of Ricky and Ronny – A Pop Opera was supported by Flemish government institutions.

Sources: Autumn program 2010, Avant Garden.

BIT Teatergarasjen, Meteor 2007. 21.11.2010: http://www.bit-teatergarasjen.no -arkiv

"The Ballad of Ricky and Ronny is an experimental performance which despite the innovative is anchored within several theatre traditions. In the expression we clearly find roots in the psychedelic drug culture of the 1960es and in Ionesco’s absurd theatre of the 1940es, but the content is as related to Ibsen’s revolt in the sultry small town harmony of the 1880es. Despite expressionless performance and radical under-acting, and a dystopian and fundamentally sad subject, the production is still filled with humour and as such pretty entertaining. "

Grimstad, Amund (06.12.2010). Review titled Livet er eit tidsfordriv (literally: Life is passing time). Amund Grimstad, amund.info/, 10.12.2010, http://amund.info/2010/12/the-ballad-of-ricky-and-ronny/