Walking the Dog

About Walking the Dog by Teater NOR: The way Teater NOR sees it, refugees have not been particularly well received in Norway. The time it takes to respond to their applications for asylum can be years and meanwhile the refugees wait in shelters. The shelters are often closed hotels or camping lots, and often they are far from civilization. Those who manage these housings for asylum seekers are economically funded on a per person basis, making it economically profitable to stow as many as possible together in a narrow area.

Teater NOR visited more than 50 such shelters all over the country with Walking The Dog, and many places the company found the conditions embarrassingly bad. Norwegians live with the misunderstanding that the cold, barren stone hills far up North are paradise, and that we will be overflowed with refugees wanting to share paradise with us, unless we are very restrictive. This must be a strange attitude to meet for people who have grown up in more civilized parts of the world and for different reasons have been forced to flee for their lives.

Walking the Dog is about being on a flight, and the target group for the production consisted of refugees from more than a hundred nations. To be able to work with the subject Teater NOR interviewed refugees from the local housing in Vestvågøy, who shared their stories and songs.

The performance opens with a table decorated for a party, standing by its own onstage. Suddenly it begins to move, to slowly rise. It flees, and the nice table setting is dissolved in an inferno, flying through the air, during which glass, plates, knives and forks fly go to the ground with a noise. Further the actress tells, through visual images and music, her story about why she had to leave her country and how she was received in Norway.

According to Teater NOR, it has always been exciting to perform Walking The Dog in different shelters. One never knows who are watching. There are always people from a number of cultures, and the interpretations and discussions among the audiences are very different from time to time. At the same time it is so that the only who have been really provoked by the productions have been Norwegians. Teater NOR has been criticised for the actress wearing too short a skirt, that it is disrespecting to show so much naked skin for Muslims, among others. Others have disliked that the company used a hand grenade in the performance, meaning that one can’t show that to people coming directly from a situation of war, who perhaps have recently lost their loved ones. All the refugees the theatre has discussed the issues with smile overbearing.

At every shelter Walking the Dog has been performed, Teater NOR has attempted to organise a cultural event surrounding the performance, so that the people in the housing can also tell their stories and sing their songs. Teater NOR also attempted to open these cultural events for Norwegians. Some places, where the shelters have active personnel, this has been very successful. Sometimes the song and music last all night.

Through touring the shelters the theatre has met people who have become friends for life, and one of them, engineer Bassim Jawad, today works for Teater NOR, having made the stage design for the production Biomechanics among other things. Walking the Dog opened in Romania in the city of Timisoara.

Source: E-mail from Thorbjørn Gabrielsen, 10.11.2010