JOURNAL FROM CAEN TO NORWAY

With the support of the Institut Français and the Région Basse-Normandie, we travelled to Norway from 28th August to 14th September 2012. “We” were Deborah Lennie, Fred Hocké and Patrice Grente. By car.

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The journey unfolded in two stages: the first took us from Caen to Bergen, where we gave a performance as part of Prøverommet, organised by BIT Teatergarasjen; the second was a period of residency followed by a performance on the island of Utsira.

The idea was to approach the journey as a kind of “road movie”, gathering film, sound and text along the way, and using this material to construct forms to be presented in the places that hosted us. These forms were to have a direct relationship with the places in which we performed: Bergen and Utsira.

 

FIRST STAGE: TOWARDS BERGEN

We left Caen by car on 28 August. We crossed Belgium, Germany and Denmark, arriving in Kristiansand, Norway, on 1 September.

During the journey, we had already begun filming and recording sound, particularly at border crossings and on the ferry that took us from Hirtshals in Denmark to Kristiansand in Norway. We followed the E39 along the south-west coast towards Bergen, passing through Mandal, Flekkefjord, Sandnes, Forsand, Lysebotn, Stavanger and Haugesund before finally reaching Bergen.

                             Throughout the journey, we were struck by the extraordinary variety and beauty of the landscapes.

                                 We stopped constantly, to the point of delaying our arrival in Bergen by a day.

One small anecdote : one morning we woke at 5 a.m. to catch the ferry from Lysebotn, at the far end of the Lysefjord. The pink moon was still in the sky, hanging in the middle of the fjord directly in front of us. It was too strange and beautiful to ignore. Naturally, we rushed to get the equipment out and filmed a short sequence in real time — while still managing, somehow, to catch the 7.30 ferry.

For us, this says something quite precise about one aspect of the way we work : making ourselves available to what eludes us, to what has not been planned, and trying to work from it. Being available to the here and now. A pink moon suspended in the middle of a Norwegian fjord doesn't stay around long, you're either there or you're not. This sequence was later brought into dialogue with a recording we made further along the road, of stones falling from a quarry and running water.

Mountain landscapes, small lakes, fjords, almost lunar environments, ferry crossings constantly punctuating the journey: after a few days, we began to experience a kind of surfeit of beauty. Beauty was everywhere, overwhelming; wherever we looked, we were surrounded by this immense natural beauty. Magnificent landscapes followed one another, each seemingly more beautiful than the last.

It may sound surprising, but it was almost with a certain sense of relief that we arrived in Bergen. Bergen has its own charm, of course, but there we were able to rediscover a certain urban ordinariness, which was not without interest for us. The banal. A half-empty car park beneath Bergen’s grey skies contrasted so strongly with everything we had travelled through over the previous few days that something else began, almost imperceptibly, to move within us. As though there was a space there; as though there were something to write, to invent.

We therefore spent two days gathering material in Bergen itself and around the venue, Chagall, and beginning to shape the material we had collected along the way.

Our presentation took place on 3 September, 2012 opening the new season of Prøverommet at BIT Teatergarasjen. It was received enthusiastically by both the audience and the organisers. They want us to come back. And the feeling's mutual.

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SECOND STAGE: UTSIRA

On 4 September, we left for the island of Utsira, where we were hosted for a week-long residency in the former lighthouse keeper’s house.

Utsira lies 15 kilometres off the Norwegian coast in the North Sea. It is therefore a relatively isolated place, with a population of around 250 people. We were deeply touched by the warm welcome we received from the municipality and from the organisers of the artist residencies, Arnstein Ek and Atle Grimsby.

More generally, the encounters we had on the island — with the school principal, restaurant owners, children from the local nursery, fishermen and teenagers — were marked by a remarkable openness and individuality.

For our project, which was to create a form in direct relationship with the island and its inhabitants, the conditions could hardly have been more favourable. We spent five days writing texts, filming, recording, and allowing a form to emerge that might somehow bear witness to the richness and complexity of this passage between interiority and exteriority.

Our brief stay on Utsira encouraged us to continue exploring this question and to find other resonances for it.

One afternoon, a class of secondary-school students arrived to visit the lighthouse. We spoke with their teachers and asked whether we could film a sequence with the students. They immediately agreed.

We asked the students to spread themselves across a hillside between the sea and the camera, over a distance of at least a hundred metres, and to remain facing the camera whatever happened. They were to stand still for ten minutes, for the duration of the shot.

In the wind.

After a few minutes, the weather changed and it began to rain. Twenty-five teenagers standing motionless in the rain. Nobody moved. Nobody even spoke. They continued to follow the instructions, in the rain and the wind, remaining still and attentive.

More than twenty-five teenagers scattered across a hillside, standing motionless, neither speaking to nor even looking at one another, for ten minutes.

We were impressed, and grateful.

Once the sequence was over, we were able to talk with the students and their teachers about our work.

The wind is one of the island’s most distinctive presences, as we discovered for ourselves. We had thought a great deal about water — about being surrounded by it and separated from the rest of Norway by it — which had been one of the reasons we were so interested in this place. We had not, however, been at all prepared for the omnipresence of the wind.

From a sonic point of view, we were able to make some quite remarkable recordings inside the lighthouse.

We had brought with us all the technical and scenographic equipment necessary to work entirely independently.

                                                                         One day, we will return.