OPUS 1. THE ANATOMY OF POWER

Written and directed by Tore Vagn Lid

The Paradox as Scenic Expression

"The Anatomy of Power" is represented on the stage through nine (periodically sharply) separated "stage images". The basis of each image is the simultaneous fixation and criticism of different social relations between people viewed in the light of their social connection and function. Thus our hope is to display or cultivate basic inter-human relationships, not as fixed individual cases, but sooner as disclosed common features, or as a certain course of action or attitude. Rather than using traditional individual characters (roles) and a natural development of the conflict between them, the experiment strives to turn the "roles" into "collective roles", each individual character into uniform "traits of character" - and the conflict to crystallize into social patterns of conflict. Criticism is levelled at the constantly increasing inhumanisation of human relationships which is the result of the over-complex and too often "silent" inner logic of what is currently described as the "new economy". Therefore the motivation for the selection of images has been based on the contradiction or the paradox. Consequently the question of "form" (even though it is "politically incorrect") has become a crucial question of "purpose". On the one hand the "new economy" surrounds itself with humanistic ideals of increased "formation of values", "rationality" and "freedom of self-determination", while it at the same time seems to surrender man and basic human relations to the ice-cold calculations of the economic ideal of profit. Because human consideration has become a commodity, honesty an appropriate sales strategy and the ideal of liberty a contemporary individualistic call on everyone to suppress their fellow beings, the theatre might - even modestly - by fixating and embodying human paradoxes on the stage, contribute to display and criticism.

(translated by Anstein Bleikli)