“Does my beat fit?” by Nordic Black Xpress and the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra” on Kloden – Dagsavisen

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THEATRE

“Does my beat fit? – Expressen and the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra”

Director: Christine Yangco Helland

Composer and musical director: Håkon Berge

With: Farqaleet Iqbal, Anna Trindade Eriksen, Khadeeja Ahmed, Hanna Ocide Kidula, Cesilie Geanina Jørgensen, Turid Rachel Bråthen, Mobeen Shayan Ahmed, Jules Akvama, Akram Khan Nasir, April Klarisse Notvik Kristiansen, Sunniva Moratiwa Greger Mathe, Jawad Aziz

The Norwegian Chamber Orchestra: Catharina Chen, Bjarne Magnus Jensen, Hanne Skjelbred, Audun Sandvik, Tomas Nilsson

Kloden Theatre

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The performance “Does my beat fit?” with Nordic Black Xpress and the Norske Kammerorkester combines sharp observations and thoughts of the future with poetry and virile classical and contemporary music. All in an original and enthralling way, where the energy between the forms of expression plays well with the various ensembles.

Who is your pack, or who are you in the pack? Are you us or are you them? The performance “Does my beat fit?” places itself somewhere between theatre, musical theatre, dance and performance, and is about identity and adaptability, expectations, migration and the urge to go one’s own way. Through a year of workshops, the students at the Nordic Black Theater – “Expressen” – have prepared the performance together with musicians from the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, with newly composed music from Håkon Berge and with texts written by the collective who are on stage.

It has become an impressively beautiful performance. It stretches poetically, but at the same time places itself in the middle of some of today’s current debates about representation and outsiders. A joint lift divided into sequences brings out both the different personalities in the ensemble, and how playful classical music can be when it is detached from the expected framework.

Led by violinist Catharina Chen, the quintet plays the instruments (violins, viola, cello and percussion) walking, standing and running, or sitting on each other’s backs. We haven’t seen this exercise so elegantly since David Byrne “disbanded” his orchestra during the “American Utopia” tour.

It starts in a quiet, dark room and with an empty stage. Then it explodes into laughter and loud hoots as the ensemble comes tumbling in, only to quiet reservedly when they see the audience. Are we their flock? Or do we belong to another? Then the orchestra also “falls out” from the back room, chaotically, but directed together. The herd as a concept is to be repeated throughout the show on several levels, but not just through steep contrasts. Everyone is dressed the same in overalls, if they want to mark a difference, they simply take off the top.

With almost lyrical movement patterns and dance, the actors create the impression of migratory birds, of movement and group belonging in both a concrete and figurative sense. One by one or several together, they “break” out of the pack and create their own stories or images. It can also be about wanting to stand completely alone, as in Anna Trindade Eriksen’s early sequence, or when Catharina Chen subtly becomes part of the ensemble of actors who aim to renounce community in order to achieve the position she has as a musician.

The cultural contrasts east/west, as in the divided city, are established early in the performance. Like when the gang on stage looks the audience in the eye and says that yes, they are smart, they know everything. Like when it’s a good idea to tie up rent, where it’s best to ski, who Gerhardsen was, when they should drive to avoid queues at the cabin and what’s best with ribs and pork chops on Christmas Eve. Then they turn everything on its head and ask, “but does your flock know what jollof rice is? Or injera, or corn rows or box braids? Or what is meant by the fact that the sharpest knife in the drawer is your mother’s slipper, an image that can also be found in several recent depictions of growing up from immigrant communities on the eastern edge of Oslo, such as the novel “Hør her’a!”.

There is a literary nerve in many of the lyrics of the Expressen ensemble as well, as a mix between fiction and rap poetry. As Mobeen Shayan Ahmed says in his “solo-rant”: “I am wrapped in Pakistani packaging, but I am made in Norway. If I were a dish, I would be biryani, with the taste of salmon and potato”, before he concludes that he is a “second-generation immigrant with first-world problems”.

The scene is simply set, and the title’s “beat” ambiguity is reflected in the simple tables that are moved around and form pieces into larger or smaller formations, as in a puzzle or board game, or territories that are conquered or lost. And “beat” is of course also a musical reference. Composer Håkon Berge is also a genius when it comes to music written for theater and the performing arts, and here he almost creates an intuitive link between the ensemble’s movements, the lyrics’ fluctuations and connections and the hungry energy. Interaction as much as confrontation. It is sometimes responsive, sometimes advanced, tonally leaping musically, but also light, suggestive and rhythmic and, above all, cleverly integrated into the ensemble’s physical and verbal expression.

Some have larger sequences than others in terms of dialogue or monologues, others lift the physical and choreographed part of a performance where everyone counts, where everyone makes up a “beat”, or a “bit”, as the case may be. It must be said that some of the lyrics are excessively unoriginal and predictable, or that the presentation is too overt, but as parts of a whole they are useful. .

One of the best sequences goes to April Klarisse Notvik Kristiansen in the breach. The text is obviously personal when she shines a light on herself and “a multiculturalism that contains all of me”. “I belong to Sápmi, I belong to Chile, I belong to Stavanger, I belong to Sørøya, I belong to Oslo, I belong to Nordic Black Xpress,” she says, putting the finger on Norway today. And for that matter the vision behind Nordic Black Theater.

Kristiansen faces a bit of contrived opposition from the others, that kind of thing, don’t exaggerate, are you going to start joicing now too? And of course she will, as the series closes in a visual reflection on the Sami, or rather the young generation of Sami’s struggle for their own culture, self-worth and pride, also summarized on stage in the mantra “CSV” and a scene taken from Fosen – the actions in Oslo. The overarching question of the performance is “Does my beat fit?”. The group naturally answers in unison towards the end: “each one of us has an abundant color that turns into a masterpiece”.