tuesday 19 april > saturday 23 april – 11pm

Trond Reinholdtsen ^(N)

Ø – Episodes 1>7

opera installation and film, italian première

Ø is a series of operas produced by the brilliant composer Trond Reinholdsten in his own alternative Norwegian Opera House, a miniature Bayreuth. For the occasion of Live Arts Week he will give us a glimpse of the Opera House project with 7 film premieres at midnight, in a new setting, and he will personally introduce and extend Ø with his live performance. For the last six years a substantial part of his artistic energy has been invested in the project The Norwegian Opra, a fully equipped opera house in his living room with all the traditional opera’s institutional elements. Several grand Gesamtkunstwerk masterpieces where produced with the composer also acting as director, set designer, main diva, restaurant chef, ticket master, webdesigner, leader of the Worker’s Union etc. For the Ø cycle, the whole house gradually becomes a giant operatic set, developing from episode to episode. The house therefore develops into an installation in it’s own right, while we follow the enigmatic trajectory and the artistic and political experimentation of Reinholdtsen’s guerrilla-esque brotherhood that has chosen to lead an existence in apparent total isolation from ‘The System’.

Trond Reinholdtsen, norwegian artist based in Oslo, was educated as a classical composer and singer. From 2002 his work began to take on a multidisciplinary character, involving conceptual strategies, emphasis on semantic meaning and critical investigation into the genre and the institutions of contemporary music. He couples references to the lecture, documentary, performance and banality with a profound interest in narrative form, mathematical structure and communist propaganda, briskly discarding emotionality, subtleness and musicality on the way. Reinholdtsen’s operas, a mixture of dystopian science fiction and existentialism, have returned to grand narratives and Ur-mythologies (Orpheus, The Apocalypse, Utopias, Narcissus) as a response to a perceived gentrification and fussiness in contemporary music. The participation of non-professionals gives rise to a constant sensation of teetering on the brink of disaster and chaos. After the final production Narcissus in 2013, in which the main protagonist drowns in a quagmire of introversion and egotism, The Norwegian Opra institution has moved to a newly purchased villa in the Swedish countryside and has begun, starting in the cellar, a new, possibly infinite, series of operas under the title Ø.
www.thenorwegianopra.no