BIT Teatergarasjen

The first time we got acquainted with you here in Bergen was your piece together with Jacob Wren, The Anthology of Optimism in 2009. Apart from the magnificent Antanas Mockus, former philosopher-artist mayor of Bogota, Obama was one of your samples of incarnated optimism back then. How has the development of world affairs or whatever, shed new lights on this former project since then?

I'm delighted to be back. To be precise: Obama as such, not the person, nor his presidency, appeared in an anthology of optimism as an example of critical optimism. We presented the fact that his election had brought an end to 8 years of brutal american corporate-fascism as an example ... and well, yes even with his extremely poor results, that still delights me with a soft wave of critical optimism. I always thought of critical optimism as an attitude, a gesture of imagination that makes resistance possible. Today we need more than critical optimism, we need riots. There is an urgent need for a rebirth of History.

The questions you raise in Book Burning, especially on the matter of electronic traces on the net, are grave concerns today. One the one side all the information that is left out in the open by personal ignorance, but also that a prepared and knowledgable paranoiac as ABBreivik couldn´t use the net without leaving traces. What is your own motivations for entering this field and have you any suggestions yourself on the way out of knowing about it all and still protecting the privacy?

What strikes me in this imminent question of today, is how it merges two old, ancient philosophical questions: the need for light, for facts, for information in order to emancipate ourselves and having - through knowledge - control over reality. It creates a safe environment. And at the same time there is the need to recognise that there are things that has to remain private because it's simply impossible to communicate them, to speak about them. There is a dark spot that no one can control, that will always remain dark, unspoken, and unaccessible for a human being´s mind. The spark of resistance in a persons life, for instance, that remains a complete mystery, while it is this that can illuminate. The single spark that has started a prairie fire, that remains always in the dark. The mysterious engine of imagination, of love and resistance: unseen, obscure, dark, even private for the body that shelters it. We need to learn to live with this paradox of enlightenment and mystery, without killing it. To live in a world with only light, information and fact, and no darkness is terribly blinding, and when you're blind you find yourself in the room together with the most radical obscurantists. "Bien étonné de se retrouver ensemble."

… Could you expand on your use of the concept of internal(ised) totalitarianism?

Inverted totalitarianism is inspired by the American political philosopher Sheldon Wolin. With inverted totalitarianism I mean the fact that in our "liberal" world our media, storytelling, news, are all so called "free", there is no state-control like in the classical totalitarian regimes under Stalin or Hitler. In our liberal world we don't do censorship, everyone has the freedom to express. But this freedom is completely politicised. Not with a visible state control with a classical dictator on top, no, it's politicised by great hipsters in t-shirts running multi-billion corporations owning all our expressions on the internet or other media. Our expressions are theirs. Inverted totalitarianism is just the flip side of the same coin as classical totalitarianism. Ok, it's still nicer to live in if your part of the middle-class and have the right papers, but today in Europe and the States, the middle class is melting away like the North Pole, heathen up by cost-cutting corporations. We can say whatever we want because it has no impact at all. The more controversial your "opinion" the more you satisfy and fortify the regime, because then the regime gets the chance to say: "look how liberal I am, hey you, have an other opinion, or take two, yes go wild..."

The way you have chosen to handle these very high-tech themes around the internet, the threats and opportunities, is a very old form of theatre. This is a very striking and interesting contrast. Are you hoping to suggest something very old solutions to the very new challenges, or is it another perspective, that the most effective way of communicating this modern dilemma is pulling on voices from the past, therefore the down-stripped old truth-teller?

Truth is not to be told. Not in the past, not in the future. It happens. It is an event. Maybe in theatre, maybe tonight, truth can happen. What is old? 600 years? The medieval theatre storytellers, are they old? The classical tragedy? Is Shakespeare dead? Heiner Muller? The theatre of enlightenment, the theatre of Artaud, too old? To me they are all alive and kicking. They say the planet is 4,6 billion years old. It's considered a very young small little planet. I use theatre forms, ideas and language form the past and the future, I use grammar of the centuries to come and props of centuries gone, just to be in the now, to be in the truth.

How did you end up with Op de Beek, and how did the Wunderkammer-variations come about?

The wunderkammer could be seen as the first "lecture-performance", its is a didactical theatre that helps to enlighten us. I try to make illuminated darkness with it. And when it turns out be dark light, I'm fine with that as well.

Can you tell something about the difference of approach for you as an actor-writer and Beeck as a visual artist, and how did you tune in to each other?

We worked in silence. There was a nearly perfect understanding about what the other was doing. I saw what he was building, and I wrote, he read what I had written and he build. In the beginning it was me who asked him, I wrote him a letter. A long letter in which I said I had nothing to say about his work, that it felt like there where bees in my mound when I wanted to speak about his work, which I followed for a long time. The only thing I could tell is there was vital mourning in it, and that I wanted to make a piece called "BookBurning". I told him a bit about what I wanted to do. And then we just started.

What can art, or especially theatre say about this that a theoretical approach cannot match?

Art cannot say anything. It can be there.