In the performance HANNAH, Verdensteatret is exploring ideas about geological time and attention fatigue used as an observatory. As a starting point, Verdensteatret went on a research journey to the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, the same destination as 10 years earlier. With this research the artist collective has, for the first time, chosen to repeat a journey and gather material from somewhere the group has already been. Along this journey the artists have questioned the nature of repetition and if repetition is at all possible. Questions that reveal doubt as a gravitational centre for our orientation. Repetition points forward in time and is an integral part of what is seen and what is done.

HANNAH consists of material generated in an electronic feedback system and is an elaborate spatial composition that provokes a state of absorption in an immersive audio-visual space. Inspired by the gradual unfolding of geological time, the material acts as a kind of sedimentation process, drawing attention to gentle transformations and how physical objects slowly affect their surroundings. From a human perspective, the material unfolds from fixed attention towards exhaustion – in the act of observing slow changes.

A production from Verdensteatret is a glimpse of a present, a state of transitions and passages through phenomenons. The present is a memory in motion. At the same time, there has never been so much past as right now.

“The piece dissolves hierarchies: everything is visible, everything is played live, there is a blatant equality of labour which feels curiously nostalgic. We see the performers communicating across artistic disciplines, in a medium in flux between theatre, sound art and visual art and in which these collisions of genre generate entirely new surfaces; geography stripped to the bone, compacted to their raw anatomical or architectural components.

...Of course, all this talk of dissolve and dissonance might give you the impression that HANNAH is a resolutely wounded and damaged piece, emotionally ossifying in its volatile intensity. But this is not the case. HANNAH spectacularly dovetails between rupture and rapture and somehow manages to be about everything.”

Colm McAuliffe. Review in “The Quietus”

Creative team

By and with: Asle Nilsen, Piotr Pajchel, Eirik Blekesaune, Torgrim Torve, Niklas Adam, Janne Kruse, Ali Djabbary, Martin Taxt, Elisabeth Carmen Gmeiner, HC Gilje, Magnus Bugge and Laurent Ravot

Thanks to: Espen Sommer Eide, Sofia Jernberg and Magnie Finnsdatter Nilsen