Opening

In the info leaflet METTE EDVARDSEN >PROJECTS 2002-2010 the following is written about the production:

"My first piece was about space, and the possible creation of new or other spaces, my second piece was about time, and collapsing causalities in respect of the directions of time, my third piece is about the theatre; as space, place, and time, with its functions, conventions, and history, and collapsing narrations.

In Opening I try to activate the audience and create a space in time to fantasise and let the capacities and desires of our understanding bring us towards other views and readings, to look and look again. Opening is also a solo, in that there is one performer on stage. But like the previous pieces, the performer is not the centre of the work, but plays together with the other elements like space, sound, text, light, curtains, doors, and more.

A first short version of Opening was especially created for an evening program presented by Les Ballets C. de la B. in 2005. The complete version of Opening was premiered in Kaaitheaterstudios in March 2006. In August 2006 the piece Opening was written as a text. The book was presented for the audience during Performatik 2 in Kaaitheaterstudio’s in January 2007."

In the spring program of BIT Teatergarasjen 2006 Opening by Mette Edvardsen was described as follows:

"Edvardsen began working as a dancer for Les Ballets C de la B in Belgium in 1996. She has participated in several productions for the company, first with choreographer Hans Van den Broeck, then with Christine de Smedt from 2000. In collaboration with Lilia Mestre she has made two productions of her own, and in 2002 she did Sauna in Exile in collaboration with Heine R. Avdal, Liv Hanne Haugen and Lawrence Malstaf.

Mette Edvardsen's stories have revolved around an interest for space, its details, its function and history. Her stories are abstract works in which she as a dancer stands beside what happens, not in the centre of it, while she asks how we perceive and understand."

Mårten Spångberg wrote the following about Opening in the production program used at BIT Teatergarasjen in 2006:

"The obsessed professor transgresses conventions and sets a new creature to the world. We all remember the films: homunculi, cold war, gene technology, the professor pushing buttons in order to change the paths of history, but something always ends up 'wrong'. An unexpected side effect transforms the obedient creature into a kill-em-all monster reproducing malignantly with the aim of erasing humanity.

It is in the side effect that invention resides, not in the creation hence the creature is already given a function. Inventions are no monsters; they are side effects without a name.

Mette Edvardsen's work is the production of these very side effects. In fact there is no performance, however there must seem to exist one as the side effect otherwise would carry a name, be the central axis of production.

One could say that there is nothing to see in the works of Mette Edvardsen, but that the performances is the seeing itself, a looking out for nothing as it comes towards you, unrecognisable.

The recurring theme of Edvardsen's work is a production of a 'vacance', a site within which the marginal is gaining its own orders of representation, no longer defined as the 'other' of a recognised, or established order of representation. Mette Edvardsen doesn’t occupy the role of the professor but is rather passing onto the spectator the blind character that hosts the side effect, unaware of its fierce capacities to undermine the coherence of representation and hence able to affiliate with its potentiality as invention.

The necessity for the Western world to exterminate its own inventions, its side effects, and to define them as fierce lies in the importance to reassure the coherence of a symbolic order. Mette Edvardsen doesn't undo this order but complexifies it to the extent where an accursed share is allowed to surface and sedimentations of norms appear soft and conspicuous.

There is no collection of beginnings only superimposed continuations, and it is in this discontinuity that the beginning is the promise of everything in its particularity, of a specificity which is not special."

Opening was supported by Arts Council Norway, The Audio Visual Fund, The Fund for Performing Artists and Les Ballets C. de la B.

Mette Edvardsen directs thanks to Vooruit/Ghent, Kaaitheater/Brussels, Stuk/Leuven

Sources:

BIT Teatergarasjen, spring program 2006. 14.09.2010: http://www.bit-teatergarasjen.no/article/64

Production program, BIT Teatergarasjen

Mette Edvardsen's private archive, donated by Mette Edvardsen, 11.12.2010