Supervisors:
Rolf Gerstlauer & Wenkai Xu
The streets become the stage. As we follow a route from where the old medieval town of Oslo lay to where the new city of Christiania was built, we explore the borderlands of the city. The walk is presented as a collection of stories: fragments from tales and theory, history and myth, theatre and art. Together, this collage of fragments form a narrative, a speculative investigation of what former city borders have meant — and still mean — for the daily performance that is urban life.
City walls, borders, edges, thresholds, barriers — these define urban spaces, both in the physical sense and in every other.
The walls that once encircled cities — defining their reach, their domain, what was let in and what was kept out — no longer serve that purpose. And yet they remain: as ruins, as memory, as story. They linger in street names, in the curve of a road, in the way one side of town feels older than the other. Cities remember their walls.
This is the nature of all boundaries — social, cultural, territorial, normative, mythical or moral: traces of them remain, continuing to impact spaces and the way we behave in them. Whether physical or intangible, they carve grooves that outlast them. City borders have a thickness to them, and within them liminal spaces occur: the in-between where things that don’t belong on either side can still happen.
The theatre is one of the inhabitants of this borderland. Celebrated, yet censored, popular, and therefore dangerous, it was one of the trades that the city expelled yet could not live without. Thus, placed just outside the city borders, the early theatres shared neighbourhoods with criminals, the morally shameful, the stigmatised, the stinking, the noisy and the dangerous.
As a child of urbanity, the theatre was born in the Greek polis, and like the city itself, it embodies paradox: ordered yet unruly, scripted yet spontaneous, ephemeral yet indelible, provisional yet perpetual. The city is home to both palace and protest; the theatre has been used to consolidate and mock, to keep the status quo, then crack it open. The theatre can imagine different worlds. Within the borders of the stage, another reality is briefly admitted into this one. Likewise, the stage of the city — the streets — offers testing grounds for new cultural expressions and ways of acting together. Just as the theatre balances on the border, so does the city, constantly on the verge of something new.
Contact
Hanna Elise Jozefiak
+4745217323 / hannaelisejozefiak@gmail.com