A CLOCKWORK ORANGE FUCKING MEN – Nordland Theatre, Norway, 2013
The performance “A Clockwork Orange – FUCKING MEN” is based on Anthony Burgess novel from 1962 “A Clockwork Orange” and on interviews with young violent men in a Norwegian prison. The novel tells the story about Alex and his friends and their violent behavior. The boys in the gang drink milk mixed with drugs and afterwards they beat up and rape innocent victims just for fun. At a certain point Alex is arrested and forced to an experimental treatment that makes him sick each time he thinks about sex and violence. In this way he is not capable of doing anything wrong. I am of course aware of the fact that Burgess’ story normally is interpreted as a discussion about the free will: Is a human being really good if he cannot choose between being good or being bad? But personally I am not concerned about good and bad. I have chosen another perspective reading Burgess’ story. In “A Clockwork Orange – FUCKING MEN”, my second performance based on the novel, I continue my investigation of the young man’s violent behavior. My artistic perspective is that men genetically and biologically are programmed to aggression and that violence therefor is ok. This is of course an impossible statement, but it illustrates my artistic project. I want to move your, that is the spectator’s, perspective of the world to a place where good and bad do not exist.
The performance is real of course because it exists, but the story we tell is not reality. It is fiction. That is why the feelings manifested by the actors cannot be something else than quotes, images or comments on real feelings. My communication strategy is not based on actors imitating our emotions but on the actors and the total scenic expression manipulating your emotions. I want you to feel real emotions. So I do not create real images of our reality. One example: In the “Clockwork”-script there is a scene where three men rape a woman. On stage you see two male animals on heat fighting, lustful moans of a man and painful cries of a woman, and you see a woman being hurt on a very aesthetic video. The man and woman on stage do not even touch each other. The two men playing animals fight with each other, but we experience the entire situation as a rape of a woman. The artistic challenge is to find actions and images that shift and destabilize the spectator’s understanding of the situation. I wish to offer the spectator new images of the world, but these images have to be logical for the situation, but surprising. The spectator must understand why I constantly give her images that link our actions to basic biology and nature.
My theatre performances are in this sense a play with reality rather than a reproduction of reality. This is why I use many references from animation films like synchronous actions, speech chorus, animal sounds and many onomatopoetic sounds like “swish” and “hmm!” Choreographed precision is very important for me because it constantly reminds the spectator of the fact that theatre is form and not reality. When the actors play with reality they are also free to do what they like with the reality you as a spectator has as the ultimate reference. I do this with a conscious desire to create shifting perspectives where I change the perspective of the world from a known and accepted one to an unfamiliar place where one can see the world differently. This place, that is my theatre, is hopefully a place where notions of good and bad and accepted moral norms do not exist.