FOR WANT OF A BETTER
VIDDE
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Direction and voice: Deborah Lennie (AUS)
Dance: Ingvild Marstein Olsen (NO) and/or Annie Hanauer (USA/UK)
Sound: Patrice Grente (FR)
VIDDE is a Norwegian word meaning a vaste, open landscape — a space from which the horizon can be perceived.
VIDDE is a series of in situ performances by the company FOR WANT OF A BETTER. Combining contemporary dance, live voice and sound, conceived for non-theatrical environments. Through the notions of exile, travel and transformation, VIDDE explores how environment shapes our identity and memory, and how displacement leaves an imprint on the body, the voice and the imagination. VIDDE sets out to question our sense of belonging: what makes home, home? It will premiere in Normandy as part of the Millennium – European Year of the Normans, with the support of the Normandy Regional Council.
VIDDE is developed in resonance with STRANGER IN A FAMILIAR LANDSCAPE, the company’s current stage creation. Stranger in a Familiar Landscape will premiere in May 2026 at the Centre Chorégraphique National de Caen, Normandie, where it is co-produced by the CCN de Caen and Chorège CDCN Falaise. Both projects share a common artistic research into the relationship between body, place and memory. While Stranger in a Familiar Landscape unfolds in a theatrical context, VIDDE extends this exploration into public and non-theatrical spaces, allowing the work to engage directly with sites, landscapes and audiences.
In situ performances and a travel journal: dance, voice and sound
VIDDE brings body, voice and sound into direct dialogue with the spaces it inhabits. Performed by director and vocalist Deborah Lennie, Norwegian dancer and choreographer Ingvild Marstein Olsen, and/or american dancer and choreographer Annie Hanauer and sound creator Patrice Grente, the performance is grounded in embodied presence and attentive listening to each site. Sound plays a central role, shaping the performance in close relationship with movement, space and acoustics, alongside live singing.
Travel journal… between Norway and Normandy
For the first performance of VIDDE, with Deborah Lennie and Ingvild Marstein Olsen, during her journeys from Oslo to Normandy for the residencies of Stranger in a Familiar Landscape (scheduled for September 2025, April and May 2026), Ingvild Marstein Olsen develops a travel journal, gathering sounds, gestures and observations encountered along the way — clouds seen from the plane, forests, expanses of water, stations, roads, crowd murmurs, fragments of conversation, sounds of nature or infrastructure — throughout her travel by plane, train and bus between Oslo and Normandy.
These fragments form a logbook of a “contemporary Viking” travelling toward an ancient and familiar territory. They feed the choreography and the sonic environment of the performance, shaped by sound artist Patrice Grente in dialogue with the performers and the sites.
In relation to this material, Deborah Lennie’s live voice acts as an embodied presence and a poetic line of force. Performed live, it creates an immediate dialogue with space, memory and audience, providing a strong sensory anchor. This collaborative work — between a young Norwegian dancer, an Australian musician based in Caen and a French sound artist — becomes another form of crossing: intimate, geographical and artistic, rooted in reality and open to imagination.
Each component is conceived as an extension of the traversed landscape, a material in transformation. Through its creative process — the circulation of sonic, bodily and spatial material — VIDDE embodies a living exchange between Norway and Normandy. The performance becomes a site of transformation: between here and elsewhere, memory and the present.
Re-sounding landscape
One of VIDDE’s foundations is its deep engagement with place — its form, resonance, history and use. Each performance is shaped through attentive listening and presence on site. Dance and voice enter into dialogue with materials, volumes, surfaces, sound propagation and the movement of the public.
The company has developed strong experience in contextual creation, notably through work on the island of Utsira in Norway, as well as in Macedonia and Eastern Europe, in projects supported by the Institut Français. These experiences have shaped a working method based on observation, field recording and sensitive engagement with local contexts, despite the company's desire to remain outside of traditional production networks at the time.
VIDDE fully embraces this approach: the real landscape, its memory and its uses become the material of the performance — an artistic writing shaped by the site, for the site. The sounds and gestures gathered through travel and on-site presence create a living link between the spaces we traverse.
A project for all audiences: a shared experience
VIDDE addresses a broad audience beyond specialist circles. It requires no prior knowledge or codes: it is meant to be listened to and experienced physically. Through an open yet rigorous form, the performance seeks to create bridges between artistic practice and everyday space.
In each city of the first stage— Caen, Rouen, Falaise — VIDDE inhabits non-theatrical sites: public gardens, chapels, castle grounds and open urban spaces. These are places crossed daily by residents, passers-by, tourists and the curious. The performance appears as a moment of attention within the landscape, at the intersection of uses and generations.
VIDDE speaks to what brings people together beyond language, origin or background. It offers a shared experience in which each person can recognise something of their own relationship to place, movement and memory. A sense of what makes us belong.
