| history | ||
|
||
DALE TEATER KOMPANI |
||
Dale is a small village of two thousand people a few miles inland from the western coast of Norway. Surrounded by steep mountains on every side, it appears to have been dropped from the sky by accident, leaving its population stranded in small wooden houses with a river leading towards the fjord and the world beyond. Its future was mapped out when a German industrialist passed through the district in the middle of the 19th century and founded Dale AS, which today exports Norwegian knitwear products all over the world. Times have changed and Dale has entered the 21st century as a modern community along the main route between Oslo and Bergen. But the mountains surrounding it are still the same. Like ancient giants, they block out the sun for three months a year just as they did two hundred years ago. And the weather is still wet - very wet! Ibsen was born in Skien, further south in Norway, in 1828. A slightly different town, but still part of a country which he described as suffocating. "…When, ten years ago, I sailed up the fjord, I felt a weight settling down on my breast, a feeling of actual physical depression. And this feeling lasted all the while I was at home; I was not myself under those cold, uncomprehending Norwegian eyes at the windows and in the streets. …", he wrote from his residence in Germany to his friend Bjørnson in 1884. Ibsen's gloomy letter makes a sharp contrast to his conversation with editor Michael Georg Conrad where he stated: "…I set my plays in Norway; I know that country best. There I am certain in regard to every point. …" Ibsen spent most of his life in Italy and later Germany, and wrote the majority of his plays abroad. Away from his native Norway he seemed to find the freedom and inspiration he needed to release his ideas and put them on the page. Always drawing on the people and the country he knew best, he stayed abroad till the age of 63, when he finally returned home and settled in Oslo for the last fifteen years of his life. Making no comparison to Norway's greatest playwright, Henrik Ibsen has in many ways become an inspiration to Dale Teater Kompani's work and development. Its theatrical roots can be traced back to the rainy little village of Dale in Western Norway. It started its theatrical activity in a closed down cinema building, where a couple of scattered publicity photos of Goldie Hawn in "Foul Play" seemed to be the only remains of what had been! There, inside that neglected and somewhat hostile building, built by the Labour Club in the thirties, the company devised its first theatrical experiments. Productions quickly became more ambitious when the company turned its attention to classical material. This was slightly premature for a company with no theatrical history, but it was soon apparent that the lack of experience was an asset which gave the company a confident freedom to experiment and follow instinct rather than established traditions. The company's final production was "Rosmersholm" by Ibsen, staged during the summer of 1995. By then the local cinema, with its draughty windows and creaking floorboards, had been bought by the council, which finally turned it into a library and community centre. In the spirit of Ibsen, far away from the village of Dale, far away from the steep mountains and wet climate, Dale Teater Kompani was founded in London in 1999, building on ideas conceived half a decade earlier in a Norwegian village. Since then Dale Teater Kompani has produced many full-scale productions (as detailed in past productions) on the London Fringe. The company has mainly focused on Ibsen and classical Scandinavian writing. It has found artistic shelter and base at the Rosemary Branch Theatre in Islington, where most of the company's productions have been developed and premiered. |
  |
|