The impossible conversation

In The impossible conversation Teater NOR deals with the global climate crisis. The climate panel of the UN has taken the pulse of our planet and given it a life-threatening diagnosis.

A rapidly accelerating crisis is about to turn our understanding of the world upside-down. A threat against the globe has arisen, a threat so serious and expansive it makes new demands to us. The different future scenarios and prognoses are inconclusive, but in common they have that the world as we know it will be gone in few years.

In The impossible conversation Teater NOR asks when we, with all our good intentions and "the successful democratic Scandinavian model", became one of the biggest sinners? And how can we lead a conversation and together reflect over the subject without sliding into a fog of accusations, concealment, shame and dishonesty? And without stagnation in depression and powerlessness?

In The impossible conversation Teater NOR attempts to act out the timidity to discussing these questions, so that the reality we attempt to avoid becomes clear.

The Water Room

In The impossible conversation Teater NOR has made its own ecosystem, through which the audience can follow the cycle of water from liquid form, via mist to ice. In the large room Teater NOR invites the audience to visit the Arctic, to explore life in the lake, dance in torrential rain, and examine the movement of the homemade clouds in the sky.

The stage is made in the shape of a large pool. In the water are large iron plates heated with Bunsen burners to make the water boil and evaporate. Powerful pumps create rain and water walls. Aided by live cameras, projectors and water microphones Teater NOR lets the water tell its own story, while the company tells its story, projected on the surfaces of the water.

The basis and idea foundation for the production:

Teater NOR is located in Stamsund in the Lofoten Islands; on an island, four hours into the sea if travelling with the Hurtigruten ships. Only the clear days the people here can glimpse the mainland on the other side of the fiord Vestfjorden. There is water on all sides. The ocean shapes the coast, the coast shapes the life along the coast. For the Lofoten inhabitants water is the prime condition for business and culture.

For Teater NOR the emphasis on water anchors the projects in the familiarity of home and the self. At the same time connections are tied to a dynamic concerning the world and the universe. It provides the opportunity to work with contemporary global currents and abstract artistic expressions while standing with one of the feet planted in the company’s local reality.

The eldest philosophers found that water spoke about time: about movement and incessant development. Heraclitus said: You cannot step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you. Such the problem of knowledge arises from the river: How can we have real knowledge about something that never stays the same, that is always changing?

In The Story of my Life the deaf and blind writer Helen Keller tells the story about how the world opened to her. It happened when she was seven years old and her teacher let something wonderful, cold float over her hand, while writing the word water in the other.

"As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life (...) as I lay in my crib at the close of that eventful day and lived over the joys it had brought me, and for the first time longed for a new day to come", Keller wrote.

(The quote is from Helen Keller’s The story of my life, 1902.)

In the language of chemistry water is H2O, it has its maximum density at 4 degrees Celsius, it freezes at 0 degrees and it boils at 100 degrees. For humans in the world water possesses qualities that cannot be examined in a laboratory. It is the ocean as a wide horizontal plane and reflects the sky. It is the frosting on mountain tops in fall, the glacier that reaches towards the valley, the ice cubes in the ridge and it is the clouds.

Water is one of the four elements and a necessity of life. Our need for water is a condition of life in a way we can’t get around. Whoever crosses the border of this need will die. It is the most important element in the story of the origin of our world and of us. It is also central to the stories of the end of the world. Such water draws the line between the early cosmologic and modern ecologic.

The discovery of water channels in our brain has led to a shift of paradigm in cellular biology according to researcher and Doctor Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam at Centre for Molecular Biology and Neuroscience at the University of Oslo. After the discovery of the first water channel, now called aquaporin1 or AQP1, researchers have identified 11 different water channels in mammals. Water channels also exist in plants, microbes and invertebrates.

The impossible conversation by Teater NOR was supported by the municipality of Vestvågøy, the county of Nordland, Arts Council Norway, The Fund for Performing Artists and the Freedom of Expression Foundation Fritt ord.

Source: e-mail from Thorbjørn Gabrielsen 10.11.2010