An actor's creative space – artistic strategies in a futurist mythical, text-based theatre

Academic summary

The actor being the central pivot point, I follow two parallel tracks in my artistic research.
One track is a practical, aesthetic exploration and awareness of the actor's (and the text's)
multisensory potential in the text-based theatre space.
Inspired by eco-, techno- and process-philosophical thoughts and practices from other art forms
such as visual arts (and in particular conceptual art) and literature, I attempt to shift my own train of
thought and my own gaze on the theatre as an art form, and the actor as an artist.
Albert Camus's thoughts on the artist as a rebel and art as protest, Simone Weil's understanding of
attention as a gracious and mystical effort, Susan Sontag's art theoretical considerations on the
aesthetics of silence, Roland Barthes's investigation of the rhythmic relationship between individual
and community through the concept of "idiorhythmy", and Paul Schrader's theory of the
"transcendental film style" - are all examples of ways of thinking and acting that my practical and
strategic artistic development work takes as its starting point, and which I attempt to interpret and
transform into a distinct theatrical idiom.
The second track in my work has a more general and conceptual approach to the actor's status,
role and function – not only in the theatre space, but in the public space in general. By staging the
actor in unfamiliar roles and surroundings, I try to expand my own and others' notions of what the
actor can be.
I give the works I create exploratory traits and defined formal characteristics that together
constitute the overall aesthetic and methodological framework that I call “Future Mythical Theater”
– understood as a theater that is based on the actor’s double presence and creative intermediate
position in two separate fictional universes at the same time – the textual and the spatial.
By giving room to the performing actor’s creative potential in this intermediate space, I try to challenge the
standardized hierarchical organization of the creative work in the theater and
facilitate a more dynamic and equal balance between the text, space and play, which in turn
opens up for the conceptual, sensory and spiritual qualities of the theater to be treated with asmuch seriousness as the illustrative, narrative and psychological. I believe that such an understanding takes text-based theater seriously as an art form and puts form first, it seeks to
create a greater awareness of form in the theater, and makes form the content itself.