Intérieur / Extérieur (Kent Olofsson, Jörgen Dahlqvist)
is an audiovisual work by composer Kent Olofsson and director/playwright Jörgen Dahlqvist for Paetzold contrabass recorder, contrabass flute, electronics, video and stage installations.
The piece deals with violence in suburban Europe in the shadow of the economic crisis. The title and structure of the piece refer to the short play Intérieur by the Belgian Nobel Prize winner, Maurice Maeterlinck, and his concept of “life’s real tragedy”.
Intérieur / Extérieur is a modern adaptation of Maeterlinck’s work, not of the play itself, but of its content and concepts, with the emerging “new Europe” as a backdrop. The play by Maeterlinck was premiered in Paris in 1895, and was intended to be performed by marionettes. In the play we see a house from the outside, looking in through the windows where we can see a happy family. Two men enter, arguing about how to tell the family about a horrendous incident: one of their daughters was found dead in the river. From a distance, a crowd of people is slowly moving towards the house, carrying the body of the dead girl. The crowd is approaching the inescapable moment of disaster, “life’s real tragedy”, which is the frozen moment when we are informed of a terrible event, as when someone close has died. It is the moment which comes after all the violence and danger have passed, the moment before we fully understand, the very moment before the trauma of this knowledge will destroy life.
