“Just remember that powerlessness is violence's best friend. And that the one who feels too small in the face of the great, will easily be able to feel too big in the face of the small.”
– The brown snail, Arion Vulgaris
In Tore Vagn Lid’s new drama Triggersystemet (“The Trigger System”), we meet the Sender, or Captain Noah as he also calls himself. Together with his vivarium of living insects and his secretive homing pigeons, he has retreated to a fairytale-like fable universe to, if possible, save himself and the animals from the contemporary deluge of new wars and crises.
As an observer and team captain, Noah examines his selected insects through an ingeniously equipped insect aquarium – a so-called “vivarium”. In this way, sticklebacks, snails, skunk trolls and scissor animals become both teammates and opponents in an audio-visual (hearing) play between man in nature and nature in man.
The play builds on Vagn Lid and Transiteatret-Bergen’s long-standing aesthetic research in the metabolism between stage and music, and between aesthetics and politics. As a new drama, the trilogy is inspired by the oldest forms of so-called animal stories with roots back to Aesop’s Fables.
The performance continues to work with what Vagn Lid has called cohesion. Three essential, dramaturgical building blocks are already forming the basis of the term. First, the importance of hearing, in the sense of listening, not just watching theater. Next, the importance of “belonging together”; the difference between listening to something alone, or listening to it with others. And finally, the possibility of being able to create new communities through this and prepare the ground for new types of cohesion in a context of individualisation, polarization and fragmentation of a public exchange of words.
Transiteatret-Bergen works at the interface between theater and music with the development of a contemporary and experimental theater. The company is led by playwright and director Tore Vagn Lid, and forms a network of artists and performers within several art disciplines. Right from the start, the ambition has been to expand the theater space as a critical experience space where the theater's musical and music dramaturgical potential in particular is at the center.
As a writing and composing director with both the Ibsen award and several Hedda awards behind him, Tore Vagn Lid steps even further into his role as both playwright and composer with Triggersystemet. Transiteatret-Bergen has made a name for themselves with a number of scenic projects throughout its over twenty years of artistry. The performance 03:08:38 Tilstander av unntak av Tore Vagn Lid, a reconstruction of the afternoon of 22 July 2011, is still performed both nationally and internationally, including a guest performance in Berlin in the Fall of 2024. The creative artists in Transiteatret-Bergen received the Hedda award for best Audiovisual Design and Tore Vagn Lid received the Hedda Award for Outstanding Artistic Effort 2020 for his work.
Cast
- Magne Haavard Brekke: Kaptein Noah (Homo Sapiens)
- Bjørn Sundquist: Brunsneglen/Mordersneglen (Arion Vulgaris)
- Even Stormoen: Pinnedyret (Phasmatidae)
- Thea Stabell: Skrukketrollet (Oniscidea)
- Eira Sjaastad Huse: Døgnfluen (Ephemera)
- Iver Bogen Griffiths: Skolopenderen (Chilopoda)
- Bodil Rørtveit: Nattsvermeren (Heterocera)
- Øystein Nesheim: Mauren (Formicidae)
- Tor Christain Bleikli: Saksedyret (Dermaptera)
- Kyrre Bjørkås: Kneleren (Mantodea)
- Mathias Grønsdal: Snutebillen (Curculionidae)
- Anders E Hultgreen: Skjeggkreet (Ctenolepisma longicaudata)
- Hans Knut Sveen: Ixodida
- Morten Skage: Vespa Crabro
- Tore Vagn Lid: Apteroessa Grossa
Note. Age Recommendation 16+. The performance has a tarantella in a cage as well as other insects on stage.
