'Building new bridges for yourself ain't easy'

BOYS by Marie Bergby Handeland has been on many people’s lips over the last weekend. One person told me that watching it had

boys

Concept and Choreography: Marie Bergby Handeland

Musical advisor: Ingvild Langgår

Light design Martin Myrvold

Dramaturge: Elin Amundsen Grinaker

Black Box teater, October 12th 2022

made them feel ‘hopeful for the future’. Another person said with a warm voice that they didn’t really have the words to describe what it did to them. Dagbladet called it ‘explosive’, ‘virtuosic’, ‘ecstatic’ and gave it a five on the dice. I will not contest these claims. BOYS is a crowd pleaser, and I would be made out of stone if I wasn’t moved by it. It’s this being moved that I am curious about.

May I introduce to you: Tayza Naing * Allan Tolnæs * Kjetil Myhren * Jonathan Jansson * Ruben Fladberg * Ridwan Noor * Andreas Skoveng Lillesæther * Mikael Blum * Elias Emanuel Nordahl: Nine teenage boys from different places in and around Oslo who share an undeniable love for music, dance and the stage. Dressed in unifying, though not identically looking outfits the performers’ sober appearance contrasts subtly with a big golden, shimmering piece of fabric that in turn morphs the stage into several different landscapes and sceneries. BOYS follows the logic of the concert, meaning that as an audience we watch a manyfold way in which this gang of talent brings us a line up of songs ranging from music genres such as rap, pop and folk, while seamlessly guiding us from beginning to end.

The producer

Just like moses

Across the water

She was nothing but a daughter

Across the sea across the ocean

god is our tea our holy notion

Gotta be our own devotion

dont let hate take your emotion

Ive done so much writing but cant be torn

Gotta stay so strong thats were i belong

As we enter the theatre, we are offered a booklet containing the titles and lyrics of all the songs we are about to hear. The credits for each song show many overlapping collaborations between the young performers, who did not know each other previously. The meeting between their different music backgrounds (‘folk meets rap meets pop’) seems to be central to the project. If Handeland could be compared to a producer, one can safely say that she has succeeded in assembling and staging an unusual boyband which, in contrast to their 90’s counterparts, actually write their own music and lyrics, as well as play their own instruments. The lyrics, not surprisingly, point towards common challenges of teenage- and boyhood, such as the expectations to be strong, having it all figured out, resisting the practical responsibilities of growing up, the hardship of losing friends. A sense of the creation process––a seven month long weekly exchange in which the boys were supported and guided in the process of composing their own songs––is somehow also visible in these texts. And as important as the words are to this piece, they also fall into the background, melting with the subtly choreographed music, avoiding the narrow trenches of the confessional narrative by not overly focussing on the stories ‘behind’ each performer.

Dance concert meets ‘non-professionals’

It is interesting to see how BOYS brings together two conceptual tendencies that have been highly popular among European contemporary dance makers in the last decade or so: the performance as concert and the emergence of the non-professional on the stage. The performance as concert tendency seems to have come from a desire to embrace the force of entertainment, as well as a means to attract new audiences, perhaps those unfamiliar with contemporary dance. (The many young faces present in the audience for BOYS confirm this correlation/effect). Working with ‘non-professionals’ on the other hand, seems to primarily have come as a call for more diverse bodies on stage. These so-called non-professionals are surprisingly mostly children, teenagers, elderly or people who don’t conform to the idea of a ‘healthy’, ‘beautiful’ or ‘athletic’ body. A collection of bodies that oppose the still dominant, if gradually changing, image of the professional dancing body. This interest in working with non-professional bodies also resonates from ideologies often found behind creative processes where ideas of co-creation, democratisation and authenticity coexist. These working methods and artistic interests are clearly noticeable in BOYS as well as Handeland’s previous work.

Having seen over the years quite some youth performances in the black box setting, I can safely say that It’s not because you make a performance with teenagers that it’s per definition good or interesting work. Sometimes you watch teenage performers embody an artistic idea that is so far removed from their own lives that the mismatch becomes uncomfortable to watch. Or you observe as an audience that the ‘non-professional teenagers’ didn’t get enough guidance, leaving us with their insecurity and nervousness, as if that is something ‘beautiful’ to watch. BOYS seem to have made a conscious decision to stay away from these aesthetics by providing what seems to be an equal collaboration between the people on stage and the people behind it. Throughout the performance I kept on thinking how much BOYS more than anything feels like ‘their’ show––they run it.

This is not to say that BOYS is nothing more than ‘a cool talent show’. There are shiver-inducing moments of vulnerability. One of them is a dance in dim light by a single performer, Andreas Skoveng Lillesæther. A loose shirt follows the twirling movements of the body, while also objecting–– as if it’s caught in a whirlwind of wanting to let go, and failing. Accompanied by piano, one of the boys, Mikael Blum sings and plays the piano from the side until the others join in: ‘I am dancing all alone/even when I do it wrong/I know its too obscene/in the future I belong (…)’. Another moment that breaks the air is when all the performers gather as a choir in an almost sculptural scene and repeatedly sing ‘Love is all around us’. While the sentence resonates in the space, I think about everything I wish to disassociate from the word ‘masculinity’. Somehow the song does the job and points me towards something more hopeful. I look around and see, for a brief moment, that I am not alone in trying to gather my tears.

Suspicious of tears

One of the many burdens of taking the role of the critic is that you’re supposed to be suspicious of your own tears. Aside from being a sucker for conventional performative tropes like melancholy acoustic music, loud sweeping beats, energetic dances and dramaturgical climax, I know that my falling for BOYS has something to do with a way of looking at younger people from further down the road. A kind of looking I might dare to name the ‘weathered gaze’––a place from where you see things the subject cannot entirely see themselves yet. As if witnessing their ‘becoming’.

In the aftermath of BOYS, I’ve had many critical questions about this weathered gaze, as well as the potential fetishisation of youth and cult of authenticity that comes with staging non-professionals. At times I’ve even felt tempted to wish for a version of BOYS that would push the unusual boyband format into something weirder. Then again, the strength of BOYS might lie precisely in that it respects what these young people have to offer and feel comfortable sharing, while at the same time allowing for a gentler way of opening up towards choices and settings that may be less familiar to them, and to us. Or, in the words of BOYS sung by Tayza Naing and Ridwan Noor: Bygge nye broer for seg selv, det ække lett/Vise hva man mener for seg selv, det ække lett/Når man er en ukjent blant så mange, blikke sett. (Free translation: Building new bridges for yourself, ain’t easy/Show what you means for yourself, ain’t easy/When you are unknown among so many, ain’t easy).

(Published Octobre 26th 2022)