Oslo’s Verdensteatret combines experimental sound and kinetic imagery in BRIDGE OVER MUD (photo courtesy of the artist)
BROEN OVER GJØRME
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
September 7-10, $25, 7:30 & 9:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
verdensteatret.com
BAM’s 2016 Next Wave Festival got under way September 7 with the U.S. premiere of Bridge over Mud, a dazzling hour-long audiovisual experience that transforms the Fishman Space into a unique electroacoustic adventure. Oslo-based arts collective Verdensteatret has created an open-ended work that made me imagine what it would be like if Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy were to take over the controls of the Joshua Light Show, combining avant-garde music and live experimental imagery with cutting-edge and DIY technology. Video of abstract gray industrial faces and slow-moving taxicabs are joined with screeching, droning sounds. Model-train-like cars mounted with lights and cameras and Russian Constructivist-inspired geometric cutouts motor across 195 feet of winding tracks, passing by plastic dishes and wiry kinetic sculptures that resemble dogs and dinosaurs, casting bizarre shadows evoking futuristic landscapes onto cardboard screens as a man blasts away on a tuba and a woman mutters hard-to-decipher dialogue.
Perplexing abstruse eyes look back at the audience. Blacks and grays are enlivened with greens, reds, and yellows. Plastic cups rise from the tracks like alien communicators. Thin metal rods descend from the ceiling, forming angular shapes. There’s a frisson of representation in the shadowy movement and the intense sound emerging from sixty speakers, but it’s more atmospheric and suggestive than plaintively narrative, enveloping the audience in a mysterious emotional resonance as it reaches an exciting, thrilling crescendo that explodes in the intimate space. A collaboration between Asle Nilsen, Lisbeth J. Bodd, Piotr Pajchel, Eirik Blekesaune, Ali Djabbary, Martin Taxt, Espen Sommer Eide, Torgrim Torve, Elisabeth Gmeiner, Niklas Adam, Kristine Sandøy, Thorolf Thuestad, Janne Kruse, Laurent Ravot, and Benjamin Nelson, Bridge over Mud is a captivating multimedia symphony, more performance installation than traditional theatrical presentation, “a work where one sees the music and listens to the images,” as Verdensteatreter (Louder, And All the Question Marks Started to Sing) explains in the program. What’s it all about? It doesn’t really matter. Just sit back and enjoy.