Past Productions

About our performance
By Veronika Kær

BLOOD WEDDING is rendered, in our interpretation, as serious musical theatre. Lorca himself was a composer and musician, which is why he mastered the poetical to perfection. It was his conviction that theatre, seen as all arts collected under one pulse, should function as a form of composition. As a consequence, his plays are masterpieces both with regard to their musicality and their rhythm.

We believe that Lorca would have enjoyed seeing his work recreated as serious musical theatre, particularly with Hans-Erik Philip’s music: tenderly open-eared towards the growing cultural symbiosis between South and Nord in our times, uniting the classical with the beauty of the Middle East, the South’s duende with the North’s feather-light sound, all united in Lorca’s devotedness to heavenly truth and his love for the everlasting living pulse on Earth.

Our concept with BLOOD WEDDING takes its starting point in Lorca’s world: the pantheist’s true understanding of everything’s nativeness. We hope to prove, through the unfolding of the plot, how Man has lost this contact with eroticism, with nature and with the universe’s gigantic forces, only to exist in loneliness, in a deceitful world full of illusions. How wrong it can go when one loses this contact with one’s nativeness and nature – this is what BLOOD WEDDING is about.

Lorca’s intention with BLOOD WEDDING was that we should be able to recognize our true, unlimited freedom. His poetical realism seeks the spirit. But not like the spiritual which we identify as all too easy and pink-coloured in our times. No, rather like the spirit’s overwhelming force when the light’s power shows us the painful truth about ourselves. For to see oneself means also to see what hurts. The disastrous absence of spirituality tears deep wounds in us, so that we, on a long flight away from this pain, create an illusory, surrogate reality in which one cannot live. Lorca describes no less than our modern world’s massive agony.

Ingeniously, he shows how vulnerable we are in our lonely misery, how we submit to the demagogues’ beckoning simplifications, make-believe solutions with capitalism’s shabby demand for more – or the patterns of vendetta, which take away the pain for an instant, so that we believe that we ourselves made this choice.

Lorca tells us that we can see clearly only when we dare to stop the flight from our pain and truly know ourselves, no matter how much this hurts. We have called out genre ”åndsrealisme” (both ”spiritual realism” and ”mind realism”) because there is a decoding under the polished surface of everything, a true image of how reality hangs together. In our BLOOD WEDDING, flowers turn into knives, love into blood, civilized behaviour into brute voracity.

The term ”åndsrealisme” covers all aspects in the ambition of this production. With regard to the set design, this genre will tell of the dimensions of the infinte, that is, energy is visible, there are several dimensions, space can feel, emotions can be felt in the empty room’s wallpaper. Everything is alive, all things communicate and affect each other. Such a set design seeks also to affect the actors out of the thought that it has the divine aspect in itself. An ”åndsrealisme” set design takes, seduces, rapes, loves, embraces, flirts with, gives birth to and overwhelms the actors. To dare to be affected and to affect someone else in return with all one’s force.

”Åndsrealismen” acting is to be truly present in a complete dedication to the work. The place one takes as an actor on the stage is therefore sacred. This is the essence of “åndsrealisme”: That the Divine can neither be proved nor disproved and that to stop searching for a meaning means accepting one’s blindness – rather than fighting on in search of clarity.

This is why Lorca wrote BLOOD WEDDING: If the character of the mother would have seen this play, she would maybe have recognized herself and therefore, with this insight have been able to free herself from her inner prison of lies.

We agree with Lorca’s intense work. It is our aim, as Lorca’s, to ”whip the audience’e eyes open”, not only for their sake but also for our own. We believe to be able to live out the very essence of making theatre through being faithful towards Lorca’s genius. And we live this out with a true love for the theatre of all times and for the possibility to become wiser ourselves on the way. But mostly because we want to place on a poet’s true pumping heart before the audience
so the naked floor can be saturated with it and drink his thickly-flooding blood, because a more intense and enjoyable theatre is hard to conceive of.

BLOOD WEDDING ends therefore in our performance with an interpretation of the Earthly laws which we human beings shall know, so that we can enter the battle between darkness and light:

No darkness,
Not the slightest shadow
Can hide itself
When the pure ocean rushes light
Over grey stems.
Searching for the black soil
Where the cry’s dark roots
Shiver in blindness, shaken
When the soul senses the scent of freedom.

Let all guilt from the heart flow
Freely like the blood that we here saw
For the blood that sees the light of day
Is imbibed by the Earth.

Let all pain from the heart flow
Freely like the blood that we here saw
For the blood that sees the light of day
Is imbibed by the Earth.

Let all darkness from the heart flow
Freely like the blood that we here saw
For the blood that sees the light of day
Is imbibed by the Earth.

"Blodwedding" M.Sarens, K. Vedsegaard, M.Hestbæk.

Stage director: Veronika Kær

Set design: Nikolaj Heiselberg Trap

Lighting design: Antonio Rodrigues Andersen

Costumes: Sofie Fruergaard

Music: Hans-Erik Philip

Sound design: Morten Dalsgaard

Dramaturg and chorus master: Beate Willma

Gladsaxe Ny Teater, 5 January-16 February 2008

… We had chosen the compositional challenge that the music should also be in dialogue with the scenographical space in which Blood Wedding unfolds itself, that is, that the music should reflect the relationship between the physical and the mental space in the drama …

… Lorca’s Blood Wedding is a river that cannot be halted and that can only be directed by the anatomy of passion. An unconscious being sure that the goal of passion exists. It is entities of this kind that are put down in the music. Hans-Erik Philip

Veronika Kær’s arrangement of Blood Wedding features a symphonic soundtrack of more than 1 ½ hours, composed by Hans-Erik Philip. This includes numerous choral movements sung in Latin and a number of solo songs to be performed by Leonardo’s wife, the Maid, and the Chorus leader. The Chorus and the Chorus leader are used in a way inspired by ancient Greek tragedy, opening and narrating the story, and stepping into it in different roles.

Press review

Information

Veronika Kær lavishes Lorca's Blood Wedding on the spectator – with light and smoke and song and dust. In the middle stands Rebekka Owe as the goddess who knows about all casualties from the start – and who sings her pain into the bodies of the audience … images and words flow together … Veronika Kær has managed to bring the senses to boil with Lorca. So forcefully that the spectator feels the real metal taste of blood …

Berlingske Tidende

… haunting, grand monumentality of the images …

Jyllands Posten

… brilliant scenography … sublimely ominous music … stupendous choral movements …

Gregers Dinckirck-Holmfeldt, journalist and writer

… visual, magical, total theatre … this is like Icelandic saga material, enriched with the light and magic of the South.

Politiken

… both the Latin language and the sound of the music elevate the drama and the space to what it is all about … passion …

Weekendavisen

… one has a cinematic experience rather than a theatrical one in Nikolaj Heiselberg Traps weathered maze of branches …

Kristelig Dagblad

… Hans-Erik Philip has composed a melancholic, powerful music that comes out of the deepest depth …

Arbejderen

… the many expressions and artistic means melt into one unique artistic wholeness … one wishes that many people will find their way to see this performance.

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