DOUGALD HINE

Tag: Riksteatern

  • Kartan över oss – How Does the Future Make You Feel?

    Kartan över oss – How Does the Future Make You Feel?

    I spent two years working for Riksteatern, Sweden’s touring national theatre, and much of that time was spent in a room in their headquarters in Hallunda, one of Stockholm’s outer suburbs, which I shared with the directors Lisa Färnström and Joakim Rindå. As ‘leader of artistic development’, my work lay so far upstream from the actual productions that went out on tour, it wasn’t always easy to know if there was a connection between the endless, fascinating conversations that went on in that room and the actual making of theatre. So five years on, it was a joy to get an invitation to work with Lisa and Jocke again, making a small contribution to Kartan över oss (The Map of Us), a production which has its premiere this month, and which is the final element in a strand of repertoire that came out of the work we did together in 2015-16.

    Kartan takes the form of an audiowalk. A fictional bureaucracy, Myndigheten för Emotionell och Själslig Beredskap (the Authority for Emotional and Spiritual Preparedness) has been tasked with creating a map of how Sweden feels about the future. The audience are greeted by the MESB’s representatives, members of the local Riksteatern association in fluorescent jackets, and led by an app on their phones and the voices in their headphones.

    Along the way, there are forks in the road. You get a question about how you imagine the future will play out, and depending on your answer, you choose one path or the other. (All of this has been mapped onto the streets of forty towns and neighbourhoods, up and down the country.) At a certain point in the journey, depending on the choices you have made, you’ll be prescribed a message from one or other of the MESB’s specialists.

    This is where I come in, as one of seven contributors asked to write and record a seven-minute reflection aimed at members of the audience whose choices suggest a certain outlook on the future. (The other members of this team of specialists include a physicist, an environmental psychologist and the Archbishop of Uppsala.) I don’t think I’m giving too much away if I say that I was asked to speak to the most pessimistic fraction of the audience, but the aim of these reflections is to rattle the frames a little: ‘to cultivate the capacity for second thoughts’, as Ivan Illich once put it.

    Kartan över oss will premiere on 19 September 2020 at forty locations all over Sweden. The play is in Swedish – it’s the first time I’ve written anything directly into Swedish, and I’m grateful to Lisa and Jocke for helping me work up the text, as well as to Anna who went through the first draft with me – but there’s a plan for an English language version in the near future.

  • Medan klockan tickar (While the Clock is Ticking)

    Medan klockan tickar (While the Clock is Ticking)

    What’s it like, when the Anthropocene is your day job? How is it to live with climate change, not as a thing you read about in the newspaper or go on a demonstration about, but as what’s waiting for you on your desk at nine o’clock each morning? What does it do to you as a person, to your relationships with those around you, to the decisions you make about your life?

    Last summer, four of us were commissioned by The Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm and Riksteatern, Sweden’s touring national theatre, to write a play about the realities of life for the scientists who find themselves at the frontline of climate research.

    As writers, we were each paired with a researcher. Four researchers working in different fields, at different stages in their careers, with different backgrounds, whose work has brought them to confront the scale of the impact of human activity on global systems.

    We met for coffee, then again for longer interviews, and out of this research came the beginnings of four fictional characters, each telling their own stories, and questioning each other about how they got here, and what kinds of hope are left when you’ve swum with dead coral reefs and watched the failure of negotiations at close quarters.

    Yesterday, our play – Medan klockan tickar, While the Clock is Ticking – went into rehearsals. If those four researchers handed us their knowledge and their stories to work with, now it was our turn to hand on the results to the four actors who will bring them to life, under the direction of Sara Giese.

    I was there for the first read-through with the cast yesterday morning – and having never written for the stage before, it is both a nervous and a magical experience, hearing the words start to take shape in someone else’s mouth.

    I need to give a shout out to my experienced co-writers for their support and encouragement – Anders Duus, Ninna Tersman and Jesper Weithz. The four of us got to know each other through the Dark Mountain Workshop that I ran for Riksteatern during 2015-16 and the common ground we found through those sessions gave us the starting point for this collaboration. Big thanks also to Gustav Tegby, the dramaturge who wove our texts together, and Edward Buffalo Bromberg who, together with Sara, translated my text into Swedish.

    Medan klockan tickar is being produced as a directed reading, with a first performance for staff at the Royal Dramatic Theatre next week, then a tour of Swedish university cities over the following month. Each performance will be followed by a discussion with the audience.

    Tickets are available for the following public performances:

  • A Journey Begins

    A Journey Begins

    This October, as the leaves gather in the gutters of Stockholm, a gang of artists, writers, performers and theatre makers will set off on a journey in search of a cultural language capable of reframing the largest questions the world is facing.

    The search will take us deep underground, into the places inside ourselves that never see daylight, the kingdoms of loss and longing, the dark soil in which love begins again.

    Time works differently down here.

    Down here you are still a child.
    You are older than the mountains.
    You are bones that have shed their name.
    You are waiting to be born.
    All of this is happening always.

    A thin thread of story is the safety line between us and forever: the memory of an upper world where cars wait at traffic lights and carry in their tanks the remains of ancient sea creatures, where cafes serve drinks brewed from beans shipped halfway around the world, and all of this looks as though it could go on forever.

    It will not go on forever. We know this and we don’t know how to know this, how to make it real to ourselves, how to imagine what it is that will go on.

    At night, this knowing and unknowing comes to us and takes the place of sleep.

    This is what has brought us here, together, to this journey.

    Originally published on the blog for ‘the Dark Mountain Workshop’, a project I created during my time as leader of artistic development at Riksteatern, Sweden’s touring national theatre.

  • The Moment When the White Rabbit Goes Past

    This letter comes to you from a hotel room in Kiruna, north of the Arctic Circle. The hotel is called the Arctic Eden. From the window, I can see the mine buildings that crown what’s left of Gironvarri, the mountain the city came here to devour.

    The way I was told it, the Swedes knew there was a mountain full of iron ore, somewhere in this landscape, but the mountain was sacred to the Sami and they had no intention of letting the Swedes find it and tear it apart. Until eventually some prospectors got an old Sami man so drunk that he let out the secret.

    The history section of the website of the company that owns the mine that tore apart the mountain is headlined: ‘Faith in the Future since 1890’.

    In the foyer of the Folkets Hus is a scale model of the city. A red line loops across from the mine, taking in the whole downtown and chunks of the surrounding neighbourhoods. On the underside of the model, a reef of ore slants downwards more than two kilometres into the ground. As they keep following it, digging it out, the city itself will be undermined. The red line marks the zone in danger of subsidence. The answer is to take down the city and rebuild it three kilometres to the east.

    You can take a bus from the current city centre that drives straight into the side of the mountain, the road spiralling down into the mine to a depth of five hundred metres, but that will have to wait for next time, because this time I came here to see a play.

    Jag Kommer Härifrån is a story about what it means to come from a small place, to grow up with the idea that everything exciting in life is waiting for you somewhere else, somewhere bigger and brighter and more open-minded. Watching it, I was back in Darlington, twenty years ago, full of the desire to escape. There’s nothing wrong with that desire, it seems to me now, but there is a problem when it hardens into a claim about the objective superiority of life in the big city, held to be an obvious truth by people old enough to know better. This is the attitude I think of as ‘urban supremacism’ – what Anders Duus, who wrote Jag Kommer Härifrån, calls ‘metronormativity’.

    The train from Stockholm to Kiruna takes seventeen hours. That’s a lot of time for talking – and the other reason I am on this trip is for the luxury of that time together with Anders and my new boss, Måns Lagerlöf, the director of theatre for Riksteatern. I still struggle to get my mouth round words like ‘boss’ and ‘job’, but for the first time in a decade or so, I have both of these things. Since January, I have spent much of my time in an office in a tower block in the concrete surroundings of outer Stockholm, trying to work out what it means that I am now the Artistic and Audience Development Lead for Sweden’s national theatre. If this job had been advertised in the newspaper, it would never have occurred to me to apply, but it came to me by one of those chains of coincidence which I have learned to trust.

    I guess if you grew up in Sweden it probably seems normal to have a national theatre that is also a grassroots movement, a network of over two hundred volunteer-run local associations that own the national organisation and arrange performances in smaller and larger places, up and down the country. To me, this sounds like the start of some extraordinary story: the moment when the White Rabbit goes past, staring at his pocket-watch, muttering to himself, and you know that you have left behind reality as you knew it.

    So, when the laughter and the applause have died away, the staging for Jag Kommer Härifrån is packed and loaded onto the tour bus, ready to head on down the road to the next town on a forty-date tour that stretches the length of the country. And having seen one of our productions out on the road for the first time, the organisation I’m working with just got a little more real to me.

    I’ll be writing more about what I’m actually doing, as these newsletters get going again, and as I get further into the process of figuring it out. I should say that I’m working 70% (as we say in this part of the world) which means I still have 30% of my time available for writing, speaking and other freelance projects. Most importantly, I’ve wound up here because the things I’ve been thinking, writing and speaking about seem to resonate with what they want to do over the next few years, so this is a chance to put some of my ideas into action.

    Jag Kommer Härifrån has fun at the expense of the hipsters of Södermalm, buying their organic groceries at Urban Deli on Nytorget. That bit reminded me of Venkatesh Rao’s essay, ‘The American Cloud’, where he suggests that today’s America consists of a Jeffersonian simulation, an imagined version of small-town life, running on a Hamiltonian platform of mechanised processes the scale of which is uncomfortable to think about. He starts with the example of a Whole Foods store, its pre-distressed wooden fittings connoting authenticity, while behind them is the concrete and steel of which the building is actually made. Steel that came out of a mountain like the one outside my hotel window.

    The deposit of iron ore under Gironvarri is one of the largest and richest ever found. When mining began, there were 1.8bn tonnes of it down there. As part of the project of moving the city, the municipality held an architectural competition. The winning design was called ‘Kiruna 4-ever’. Today, less than half of the original ore remains to be mined. It seems that Kiruna has accepted the need to dismantle and re-mantle itself with little complaint. I imagine that only a city whose existence was this bound up with a single industry could be so accepting. The current rate of extraction of iron ore is over 25m tonnes a year. The new city hall will open next year and by 2021 the beautiful wooden church will have been rebuilt on its new site. The full project of moving the city will be complete sometime in the mid-2030s. By my reckoning, that is about when the ore will run out. I suppose that’s what they mean by faith in the future. Still, ‘4-ever’ seems an ambitious timescale.

    Sent as Issue 5 of Crossed Lines, my occasional email newsletter.