Staging Cultural Identities as Political Performance: Hålogaland Teater, North Norwegian stage language and the emancipation of North Norwegian identities

Abstract

When Hålogaland Teater was established in Tromsø in 1970 as Norway’s first regional theatre, the main goal was to create a professional company that would act as a people’s theatre of North Norway. In order to achieve this, the underlying principle of the theatre was that they should produce plays about the North Norwegian reality using a North Norwegian stage language and that these plays should be devised in close collaboration with the local population. Initially this caused a lot of controversy because the theatre challenged accepted standards of theatre-making both in terms of content and representation. For some it was utterly inconceivable that national and international classics such as Peer Gynt and Hamlet should be performed in a low-status North Norwegian dialect. It was simply perceived to be a sign of the deterioration of the arts! Despite heated debates and major conflicts, the artistic and political principles of Hålogaland Teater remained constant and today, almost fifty years later, both Shakespeare and Ibsen are performed in North Norwegian dialect without any protests and with great success. How was this development possible? And what has it meant for the northern region and its people? These are questions that I am exploring in this article with the aid of Bourdieu's “thinking tools”. The main argument is that Hålogaland Theatre has been central in the revaluation of Northern Norwegian identities and culture by elevating the low-status Northern Norwagian dialect to the status of official stage language.