Jon Refsdal Moe about the Retrospective.
Theatre director Jon Refsdal Moe welcomed the audience before the show “Bang Bang Club” during the opening of the retrospective at the Black Box Theatre 02/13/15:
“We are a theater for innovative theater. It has been long. 30 years. And The Chosen is an innovative company. There has also been a long time. 21. And it is precisely this paradox we have in common: We carry on a tradition where we are constantly looking for the new, the past, the future-oriented. We will be delighted. It is the role of art.
But the problem for us working with theater arts, is that we do not leave behind monuments. We live under the renewed ideology. And if we do not stop sometimes and look back, so we are forgotten. Sometimes we also oppose the idea always to go further – to always produce the new.
In the past we have seen that several artists have begun to resume old workers. Marina Abramovic did it in New York and got a real telling off for it. Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker was here last year with Stage a show from 1982. This autumn will Odin Teatret, the group opened the Black Box Theatre in 1985, and which has become a living monument over the last 50 years of theater history.
Therefore we thought it was a rare good idea when they Featured suggested arranging this retrospective. Because we as an innovative theater is also responsible for safeguarding the heritage that constantly produced around us, and to create new monuments.
Tonight we will see Bang Bang Club. There is an 11 year old show. Had it been a sculpture or a painting had still been regarded as completely new. For us who live under the renewed ideology, it is a small event to see it again. As a memory of the past. As a museum piece – a small monument.
But as any museum piece is not Bang Bang Club detached from time, neither from the time it was created or from the time we meet it in now. And it is precisely here, in the tension between these two dates, these admittedly rather short eleven years, that there may be something interesting.
Then welcome you shall be – and hope to see beyond a month. ”
– Jon Refsdal Moe
Theater, Black Box Theatre