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with Lars Vaular & Alan Lucien Øyen

Festival square

Norwegian rapper Lars Vaular makes his debut as a poet at Torgallmenningen, in a free event that is open to all, during this year’s Bergen International Festival.

“I’m most excited about finally being able to stage my texts in front of a large audience for the first time. That’s where the stakes are really high – and where the payoff can be absolutely huge,” says Vaular.

The performance is described as a “ritualistic sacrificial mass”. Set in a stylised, alternative universe, it imagines the future as seen from the 1950s.

The narrator is in a world beyond our own. Together with the dancers he discovers books from a bygone age. The music, composed by Frode Kvinge Flatland, is set in motion by the composer's exercise bike, and a poetic ceremony unfolds through Vaular's poetry, with choreography by Alan Lucien Øyen, and improvisation by Kjetil Møster.

At the centre of it all stands Vaular with his newly written poetry. For nearly two decades, the rapper from Bergen has rhymed his way into becoming the soundtrack of an entire generation, and now reveals a new side of himself.

The texts are character-driven poems about a changing Bergen in the early 2000s, and the event gradually builds towards an inevitable climax. The performance is rooted in the contemporary fear of the apocalypse.

“We tend to believe that we’re living in the worst of times. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. But right now it can feel very immediate. The performance tries to comment on our present moment – on the sense that the doomsday clock is ticking ever faster. That said, it’s done with a touch of humor,” says Lars Vaular.

Vaular will also feature in the Festival’s Closing concert, where he will give the largest symphonic concert of his career.

Contributors

• Lars Vaular voice

• Frode Kvinge Flatland composer, synthesizer

• Kjetil Møster saxophone

• Alan Lucien Øyen choreography

• Nina Exposito stylist

• Christopher Cardoso, Andreas Roksvåg, Noelle Elyza Deriada, Leona Klepsvik dance

• Teo Viksjø SFX

• Tonje Berg Pettersen producer

Age recommendation

• No age limit

Language

• Performed in Norwegian

A co-production between

Bergen International Festival, Standing Ovation and Lars Vaular

Supported by