Walk Cat, Walk! - Scenic Variations on a Theme

Written and directed by Tore Vagn Lid

Is it possible to trace a connection between ‘culture’ and ‘body culture’, between the ‘art sphere’ and the ‘fashion sphere’? Is there a connection between the theatre and the catwalk? By examining the modern artist’s understanding of herself, in Walk Cat, Walk! these questions become matter of subject for the theatre itself.

On reality TV or in the star-primed interviews of the film industry natural talent and distinctive personality are emphasised. In Walk Cat, Walk the spotlights are reversed and directed towards the culture industry’s own “following spots”. Theatre is turned into catwalk and catwalk into theatre. Thus criticism becomes self-criticism: “The truth in the theatre ended in the 1950s,” declared a well-known Norwegian theatre voice some time ago. The truth about the theatre, however, might still be made a theme?
To acclaim – as one often does – that the theatre’s job today is to convey an “archetypical story” about man, is at the same time to turn one’s back on a historic reality of technological revolutions, shifting ideals and profound economic and political changes. What once was true in the theatre, might not be true any more:
The full-bodied women of the baroque period are substituted by an anorectic Posh-Spice, the bow and the arrow by the heat-seeking laser weapon, and the monks’ hand-written manuscripts by the hypertext on the Internet. Thus, in Walk Cat, Walk! there isn’t any uniform storyline or story either, but a bundle of images and fragments.
Related to form, the idea has been to borrow form from music’s “Variations on a theme”. The theme “Talk-show” pegs out its claim and is followed up through its scenic variations, as if it were variations on the art scene’s own “backroom”. From silent monologues, by way of more or less realistic, dramatic sequences to actors who sing their own sound- track on stage, Walk Cat, Walk! includes six such variations altogether:

Theme: Talk-show
(Cadenza: “… but maybe, if I could have some music!?”)

1. Variation: Silent Monologue
2. Variation: Double-play
3. Variation: Audition-Jam
4. Variation: Thinking Chorus - “The Original Story About Ourselves”
5. Variation: Hunting Lights
6. Silent finals: Deceptive Resolution

(Tore Vagn Lid )