W = Why this performance? – the performance 23.27

This post is written to tell my international friends what I am working on these days. 11th of may 2016 my oldest son Daniel died. Cancer was the cause. Losing a child is a parent’s worst nightmare. It happened to us. I have always been open about death and grief since the day we learned that Daniel had cancer. Last year I made a performance about death. About what death is in a folkloric perspective. Daniel saw this performance, it was his last performance.

Now I have made a performance about what it means to lose a child. Daniels favorite story was the Norse myth about Baldur. I have created a performance which combines the autobiographical with the Norse. There are two parallel stories that enters and mirror each other. I am not alone in this work, I have with me a composer and a musician who plays the accordion and that helps to give the performance a creative expression.

I do not create this performance because I have a therapeutic needs. I believe that when an artist gets strong emotional impulses there arises a need to transform this into something that can benefit others. Lately I have been concerned with life skills. We need tools to deal with failures in life. To me, the stories from the tradition give these tools. This performance focuses on how to articulate the grief, anger, joy and hope that penetrates the moments when everything appear and disappear.

The performance is called “23.27” which is the time Daniel was declared dead. The performance premieres on storytellingfestival on March 23 here in Oslo. We have just had two test performances and are still developing the piece of work. I guess we will continue with that until the final day.

This weekend I am going to Athens to perform something quite different, maybe I see you there.

Oh, you might wonder about the “W”, it is because I am writing about the process of working with this performance in an alphabetic order.