September 2016
I co-directed Forced Entertainment‘s ”De omöjliga möjligheternas hus” for the Swedish National Touring Company, Riksteatern, with the smart, very funny and talented actors Ana Stanisiç and Linn Grøder Bjørnvik.
Forced Entertainment is a Brittish performance group, founded some 30 years ago by a group of friends from university, relocating to the industrial city of Sheffield. The group is and has been hyped in continental Europe for several years, and has meant a lot for the development of performing arts, with its own take on performance, anti-theatre, and comments on the theatre tradition. They have their own style.
The big challenge for us at Riksteatern was to translate that style, developed by a specific group of individuals over a period of 30 years, to something our actors could perform, in a way that kept the attention of our 6-9 year olds in the audience. With great guidance from FE’s Terry O’Connor and their collaborator, the lovely director and clown, Pascale Petralia from Belgium, we found our own version, not too different from the original.
It was such a joy to be welcomed into an already existing artistic universe, with a magic room, projections and a music score already in place. And it was beautiful to see how the young audiences were pulled into the fiction, the fairy tale; how they responded to our suggestions of imagination; how they wanted to play.
Pelle Hanæus 