Passing Place

The action in Passing Place by Mobile Homes followed both a historical and a contemporary trail: The historical was represented through fragments from the life of the famous North Pole explorer Roald Amundsen. The contemporary was represented through a female academic staging Roald Amundsen’s life at an academic conference about the climate crisis, aided by a group of actors.

During Passing Place music became a strong carrying element and in the endgame it was given a character of opera. The music, written for piano, singers, sound recording and electronics, was connected to the thematic of the performance emotionally as well as politically and geographically. This added a many faceted aspect to the music, putting it some place between belonging to a place, melancholy, beauty and modernist complexity.

Interacting with the music, the sound material made an important part of the performance’s design. The sequences stemmed from processed recordings of phenomena under the water surface in the Northern Sea and under the glaciers in Greenland. Recordings from historical events from the areas along the itinerary were also presented and electronic sound materialised in radio transmissions and as an expression for technology and industry. In the video panorama of Passing Place processed historical material from Roald Amundsen’s polar exhibitions were included.

Passing Place was produced by Mobile Homes supported by Arts Council Norway, The Audio Visual Fund, NAPA, Dramatikkens hus, Nordland Visual Theatre and Stamsund International Theatre Festival.

Source:

Dramatikkens hus, dramatikkenshus.no, 31.08.2010, http://www.dramatikkenshus.no/pub/dramatikkenshus/Innhold/kalenderarkiv/?aid=1060&cid=1045&viewall=1#dramatikkenshus