7.6.2 Nature is not Beautiful

This project also led to engage in new thoughts which resulted in a production with my trio BOL: “Nature is not Beautiful”. (this project has also been described in Chapters 3 and 4 (Video). The idea of using text as a structural framework for a performance, and of using the speaker/storyteller role intertwined with music and sound, also seemed like an exiting possibility for a trio concert format. I wanted to have a text created for us that would focus on something important and relevant, and that had a relatively clear message. We decided to focus on nature, the environment and responsibility. When the author Siri Gjære decided to write a rather metaphoric and poetic text cycle, I realised that I also wanted a more tangible text to comment on it, and that it would be hard to move between the “poetic” and the “direct” speaker in a natural way. This was resolved by recording her voice performing the poetic texts and playing back the texts as a returning component in the performance – while I took the role of “informing and commenting” with voice in real time. This solution contributed to, for us, an interesting new element in the performance as such. The overall text structure was connected to a clock/the hours passing/getting close to “deadline”, and this made us want to use a scenography that reflected this idea, which was made for us by artist Anne Helga Henning, Trondheim (shown in the beginning of this chapter). I experienced that both the form and the character of the texts (12 separated, poetic, rather open texts with connected “comments” or ” information”) made it easier to move back and forth in the continuum between sound, music and “narrative”, than in the short stories of sound. I also experienced that the trio setting made everything less vulnerable to breaking the connection between the sound and the text; I did not have to produce everything that happened and I could go out of focus and “change roles” while the music was continuing. The performing of “comments” and “facts” gave a different feeling of nearness to the audience when compared with what I have been used to during my trio concerts. In the developing awareness of roles, this experience is an important reference to bring into the more traditional concert settings.

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