Erosion – 1995

About This Project

Erosion was based on a text by Jon Fosse.

Production theme:

1 – Whoever loses his life shall find it.

2 – If that man is not able to get one’s true feelings to action and communication, emotions become false, actions fatal, life demonic, to eventually die and go under.

The silent voice

“The literary writings as I write it, is not to be understood as some ‘idealistic’ size, it is not ‘abstract’, ‘pure’ or ‘spiritual’, it is hardly ‘beautiful’, however, it is ‘materialistic’, ‘concrete’, ‘impure’, ‘physical’, ‘spastic’ and ‘disturbing’ and if it is beautiful, it will be what we call ‘styggfin’ (ugly-nice). Nevertheless, it is in my opinion that these writings are attempts of (not less than) finding a kind of access to what I in lack of better words would call ‘the holiness’, perhaps it should been modified to the ‘human holiness’, or the ‘secular holiness’, if that kind of ‘limitations’ is needed (something I do not feel a need for myself).

Such a view of literary writings might remind of what we have learned to understand as ‘negative theology’, except from that this has nothing to do with theology at all, but is maybe rather about something that might resemble the ‘mystery’, in many contexts I have explained my own writings as a kind of negative mysticism, in ‘analogy’ (of course) to the concept of negative theology … and when I started writing for theater, I began to invent the concept of stage shift, and it struck me how close my writings, with its ‘gestures’, and say ‘dialogic communication of the voices and actions of the individuals’ – stood to the theater, and in the same way as ‘a mute voice’ must follow the literary writings, a similar voice must follow a theater play and become what ties it together and gives it its ‘uniqueness’, its actual ‘indictment’. And this silent voice is precisely established along and out from ‘the negative outline’ as ‘the spoken’ inscriptions make possible, whether it is expressed as a more or less ‘meaningful’ thought and spoken language, or through what ‘happens’ between humans, or through ‘image intensities’.

I have now written some plays, and if you ask me, they are all a kind of ‘transmission’ of my literary writings into some kind of scene shifts as the text, to be really speculative, probably already was. When Thorkil Evan Nielsen read my novels, he saw, I imagine, something like that. In any case he meant that bits from my novels could be put together to a theatre play he could develope further.

And I have to admit that I’m happy it was a Dane who boldly should defiant the New Norwegian limits of language and see ‘the scenic’ or ‘theatrical’ possibilities in my writings and, moreover, have resources and energy enough to get it ‘implemented’ as theater.

Most of the ‘concepts’ in this text have I put in quotation marks. And I get more and more difficulties of using concepts, so enormous I feel these difficulties are, that I at this unique opportunity, allowed myself this exceptional luxury of not just putting acquainted notions in quotation marks, but also the text itself.”

Høgda, in October 1995

Jon Fosse

The instructor on Erosion:

“Whoever loses his life shall find it.”

“If that man is not able to get one’s true feelings to action and communication, emotions become false, actions fatal, life demonic, to eventually die and go under.”

Erosion’s overarching dramatic action takes place in an undefined day in the life of five unprotected humans. In an extreme condition, strongly affected by a prancing lack of memory and context, grounding to time and place, each one carrying their fragmented history. A grotesque world. A psychotic world. A Sitch. The characters’ actions are vengeful or marked by forced repetitions. An endless grief process.