Mitt lille en-hund-show* (My little one dog show)

Mitt lille en-hund-show* (My little one dog show) by Opdan Produksjoner was about a child’s feeling of guilt and powerlessness when her mother’s loving grip felt as abuse and the home as her prison. Does a child always have to love her mother? When is the time to let go?

Mother, mother, how could I thank you enough? How was I to make up for it? Pay for me? Never raise my voice, never disagree with you? Cut off my hands by my wrists?

"In 1994 my mother stood in the kitchen making meatballs, and inside my bedroom I betrayed her. At least, that was how it felt, where I sat with the short story and poetry collections by Gro Dahle, laughing wildly at her bestial description of the mother. So endlessly liberating that someone dares put words to the thoughts we are not supposed to think, I though. Her texts felt like a kick in the stomach, for in a bizarre way I knew exactly what Dahle was talking about.

As I work on this project fourteen years later, it is obviously easy to pose the question whether it in 2008 is innovative to describe the relationship between mother and daughter, female identity and the difficult emancipation. No, not necessarily, but to me Gro Dahle manages to discuss a familiar subject and to convey it in a new, different and provocative manner", Kristin Aafløy Opdan wrote about the production. (The quoted excerpt from the performance and Opdan’s text are both translated by Sceneweb’s Lillian Bikset, considering that the production not yet exist in an English-language version.)

Source: The Open Theatre (Det Åpne Teater), detapnetater.no, 25.10.2010, http://www.detapneteater.no/pub/daat/forestillinger/?aid=583&cid=17&sac=all&viewall=1#daat

"Mitt lille en-hund-show* (My little one dog show) has become through-provoking theatre about dependence and emancipation."

Elisabeth Rygg. Aftenposten

*Not yet translated into English. The title within parentheses is the Norwegian title's literal meaning.