NIGHT TRIPPER
Music for concert & dance performance (2012)

Night Tripper takes shape as a trail through the woods, a concert performance, a ritual and social event. It starts in the twilight hour and takes the audience into the night. The piece features six performers, curious instruments, numerous installation artworks, a local choir and a lot of potent spirits. Night Tripper explores the idea of nature as animistic, as a place of both healing and destructive powers, of immanence and transcendence.

Duration of concert performance 60 min

CONCEPT Fiksdal / Becker / Langgård
CHOREOGRAPHY Ingri Fiksdal
SCENOGRAPHY Signe Becker
COMPOSER Ingvild Langgård
PERFORMERS Pernille Holden & Julie Solberg
MUSICIANS Jørn Tore Egseth, Ane Marthe Sørlien Holen, Ingvild Langgård/Øystein Wyller Odden & Gunhild Mathea Olaussen
COSTUMES Signe Becker
COMMISIONED & PRODUCED BY Up To Nature, a collaboration between brut Wien, Black Box, In Between Time, Anti Festival & Maska
CO-PRODUCED BY brut-künstlerhaus (Vienna), Inbetween Time Productions (Bristol), ANTI festival (Kuopio) & Black Box Theatre (Oslo)
SUPPORTED BY Up to Nature, The Norwegian Arts Council, Fond for lyd og bilde and Fund for performing artists
TOUR SUPPORTED BY PAHN and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and The Norwegian Arts Council
VIDEO BY Morten Forsberg

“As the moon brightened above, the sense rose that we were taking part in a terrifying pagan ritual. At the height of this tension, the band started singing – and somewhere in the distance, the earth itself seemed to respond. It was an extraordinary piece, simple yet powerfully affecting – much like the festival as a whole”
Maddy Costa, The Guardian, 2013

"About halfway through last night’s TBA performance Night Tripper, I was convinced I was caught in a spell. The entire atmosphere suggested an intention to engage the audience in the mystery of the natural world. For the lack of a better term, there was the sense that magic was involved.
Climbing back aboard the bus to head back into town, I found myself already disappointed to be returning to an urban environment. We had only been gone for a couple hours, but I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t feel transformed in some way by the experience"
Noah Dunham, Portland Mercury Online, 2015

“Night Tripper is the most convincing collaboration between dancers, musicians, a forest and the sun. A fade into the depth of the night.A fade into the depth of the night. A call for the ghosts of the woods. A trip to the edge of perception. A journey into the dark sides of your soul. No drugs required.”
Thomas Frank, Artistic Director at brut-künstlerhaus

“As the moon appears through the tall pine branches lining the sky, pushed around by a cold summer breeze, I notice two performers standing in the middle of our circle; their arms are painted white, long hair obscuring their faces. As they move like two pendulums in and out of sync, gaining more momentum in their contact with the ground, sounds begin to filter through the site, at times atonal and at others musical, screeching and teasing out the moon light, in perfect antithesis to the durational repetition of the movement routine. It’s an extended moment that guides us through this passage from dusk to night-time, softening our landing in the deep darkness of the forest; a mesmerising accompaniment that makes visible the forest itself, all magic and mystery.”
Diana Demian, Exeunt Magazine, 2012

"Fiksdal, Langgård and Signe Becker developed this unusal scenario with a lot of attention to detail, playing with the situation as if the action was taking place outside the theatre building and even out of the city, to allow the guests to take an active role in the situation which evolved gradually so that everybody could adopt a position on the idea of ghosts, good or bad. Night Tripper offers a good opportunity to let your thoughts roam in a way in which, in your everday life, you might not normally be able to do, and to the carefully crafted enchanting place in the show is truly inspiring"
Judith Staudinger, MASKA Performing Arts Journal, 2013


“Night Tripper is quite, and quietly, extraordinary. Singular in its ambition and joyously hypnotic, there’s something mischievously comic and deeply moving about it. It’s also, in simple terms, very beautiful”
Gregg Whelan, Artistic Director of Lone Twin and ANTI festival