I Disappear Stage Reading in Penghao Theatre Beijing

Voices from the North – Norwegian Contemporary Playwriting Series

Nothing Else. No home and no country and no history.



Language: Chinese

Producer: Ibsen International

Co-Producer: Penghao Theater, The 8th Nanluoguxiang Performing Arts Festival

Venue, Date and Time: Beijing Penghao Theatre, July 26 14:30 and 19:30


SYNOPSIS

I Disappear by Arne Lygre won The Norwegian Ibsen Award 2013. With I Disappear Arne Lygre ensures his position as one of our most interesting playwrights.

Two women, Me and My friend, must hastily leave their country. Little will be said of the political background. For Lygre’s favourite subject is the fragility of the Self one is creating – precarious, worn down by buried memories, haunted by other possible lives. In order to ward off what is threatening them, all along their flight, Me and My friend invent strange role plays. Lygre’s playful and compelling writing tirelessly interlinks urgent situations with phantasmagorical scenarios.

“I disappear by Arne Lygre moves through a dark landscape with a female I, her girlfriend, daughter and husband. The world described is uncertain bordering the threatening. The woman is caught in a life situation, an existential crisis, she is reflecting upon. Arne Lygre uses different narrative perspectives in his examination of our time’s constant staging of one’s own identity. The form mirrors the content in an elegant, suggestive and intellectual way. The text is open as well as mysterious with many changing landscapes.


CREATIVES

Director: Victoria Meirik

Victoria Meirik has her background from Amsterdam Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in directing. She has been nominated for many of her productions and awarded the Hedda prize for best directing for Antigone by Sophocles. She has worked in Denmark, The Netherlands, Czeckia and China. Her last production was The Glassmenagie by Tenesse Williams. She is also associate professor by the Norwegian Theatre Academy and the artistic leader of the Norwegian Dramatic Festival in Oslo.

 

Playwright: Arne Lygre

Arne Lygre (born 6th, February of 1968) is a Norwegian novelist and playwright. From 2014 to 2016 he is the in-house playwright at the National Theatre Oslo. Arne Lygre made his debut in 1998 with the play Mother and Me and Men. Since then he has written six other plays, which has been staged and published in countries around the world.  Man Without Purpose was directed by Claude Régy at Odeon Théâtre in Paris in 2007/08. Arne Lygre wrote his first short stories collection in 2004, In Time, for which he got the prestigious Norwegian literary award Brage Prize. His most recent play, Nothing of Me, had its world premiere at Stadsteatern Stockholm in April 2014, receiving a four star review from The Guardian.

 

CREDITS

Performers:

Li Zheng –I

Wen Xiaoying – My Friend

Wang Xiaohuan – My Friend’s Daughter and A Female Stranger

Zhang Xiaochen – My Husband

Lighting operator: Dong Zhaomeng

Graphic Design: Dynamic Wang

Script Translator：Yang Zhiyan

Photographer: Qi Rui

Producer: Fabrizio Massini

Series Coordinator: Shiya Lu

Executive Producer：Jennifer Zhang