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 try, where possible, to touch on these two tracks so that the practical and the theoretical, the physical and the metaphysical, play simultaneously and become a doubling.

In the artistic research, 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 (ideal/spiritual) and the spatial (material/physical).
By giving room to the performing actor’s creative potential in this intermediate space, the standardized hierarchical organization of the creative work in the theater is challenged and facilitates 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 as much 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 – or, to put it another way – creates a greater awareness of form in the theater, and makes form the content itself.