Åpne dagsseminar 27. og 28. mars 2006

PARTICIPANTS BIOS

Namaa Alward has worked as an artist for over 30 years. In1973 she received the best actor award in her home country Iraq, where she played at the National Theatre in Baghdad, and the People’s Theatre in Baghdad. She also worked with the National Theatre in Algeria and in independent theatre companies in both Algeria and Iraq. After leaving her country in 1982, she worked for 5 years in Algeria and Syria, before coming to Norway in 1987. During the years in Norway she has been busy creating performances for the theatre, working with well known artists such as Issak E. Issak, Hege Rimestad, Birgitte Grimstad, Erling Kittelsen, Mamadou Dioume (Peter Brook Company) and Kenneth Dean. She has taken part in several movie productions, among others, the prize-winning documentary Mørketid by Karoline Frogner, the television series Bryllupet (NRK) which was later adapted for the screen, and a film on Ibsen currently being produced and directed by Edvardo Lamora.  Alward has been profiled in the book Portrait of a Neighbor and has additionally worked both as a director, a stage pedagogue and a workshop leader in several national and international projects. In 2005 she was awarded the Hans Christian Ostrøs Cultural prize, and was asked to hold the 17. May speech at Henrik Ibsen’s grave in Oslo.

Sarah Cameron Sunde is the Associate Director of New Georges, an OBIE-winning theater company known for producing highly-theatrical new plays by women in downtown venues.  She is a recipient of a 2005 Princess Grace Fellowship in Directing (Robert & Gloria Hausman Theater Award) and 2005 Artist Award from the American Scandinavian Society. She recently directed the New York debut of The Asphalt Kiss by Nelson Rodrigues (Brazil’s most well-known playwright) at 59E59 Theatres. In 2004 she directed and translated the U.S. debut of Night Sings Its Songs by Jon Fosse at The Culture Project in New York City. Sunde subsequently co-founded Oslo Elsewhere with Anna Guttormsgaard.  She also co-founded the Translation Think Tank in 2004 with dramaturg Marie-Louise Miller – in order to challenge the status of theatre-in-translation in the U.S. today – and has spoken on panels about translation in venues such as CUNY, New Dramatists and The Playwrights Center (MN).  

In New York, Sunde has directed for theatres such as New Georges, The Cherry Lane Studio, Women’s Project, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, HERE, and Spring Theatreworks. She is currently translating/directing deathvariations by Jon Fosse, to be produced at 59E59 in August/September 2006 (with readings at The National Theatre of Norway in spring 2006); developing a new adaptation of Ibsen’s The wild Duck with Blair Brown (2006 Artists in Residence at The Hermitage Artist Retreat); and creating a site-specific devised theatrical work for New Georges. She is a graduate of UCLA's School of Theatre, is a member of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab and a current member of the Soho Rep Writers/Directors Lab.

Anna Guttormsgaard has worked professionally as an actor for several years in both Norway and the US. She is Co-Artistic Director of The Unbound Theatre, and co-founded Oslo Elsewhere with Sarah Cameron Sunde. Guttormsgaard`s work as a translator include Water by Sheila Callaghan, and The Lover by Harold Pinter which she produced and directed in Molde. As an actress, she had her professional debut as Solveig in Stein Winge´s Peer Gynt at Riksteatret. She later worked at "Teatret Vårt" in Molde, where she portrayed roles such as Lady Anne in Richard III and Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew, and where she together with Carl Morten Amundsen created the one-woman performance Fidel´s Island for the 2000 Molde International Jazz Festival. She has worked with Norwegian theatre artists such as Stein Winge, Bjørn Sundquist, Hilda Hellwiig, Yngve Sundvor and Sossen Krogh. Guttormgaard`s first theatrical creation in New York was Pissing in the Wind (written and directed) for the 2002 New York International Fringe Festival. She was last seen in The Unbound Theatre´s critically acclaimed production of The Workroom. Other acting credits include: Night Sings Its Songs, Boys´Life, After the Fall, Under Milk Wood, Game of Patience, The Physics Project. She is currently working on the translation/adaption of Henrik Ibsen´s Rosmersholm for Oslo Elsewhere´s IBSEN/FOSSE 2006-project, which will be produced at 59E59 in August/September this year. Anna Guttormsgaard is a graduate of Circle in the Square Theatre School.

Arthur Nauzyciel studied theater with the great French stage director Antoine Vitez, then with Anatoli Vassiliev at the School of Theatrical Arts in Moscow. In 1999, Mr. Nauzyciel directed the world premiere of Moliere and Giovanni Macchia’s La Malade Imaginaire ou Le silence de Moliere (The Imaginary Invalid, or The Silence of Moliere), which received the 2001 Generations Award from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs; productions in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Beijing and Hong Kong followed. He has worked in collaboration with Lorient’s Music School and created the world premiere of Philippi Dualt’s opera, Le Livre de Seth (Seth’s Book). The US premiere of Black Battles with Dogs was at 7 Stages in Atlanta, Georgia in 2001. He recently staged Beckett’s Happy Days in Paris and Buenos Airea; Koltès’ Robert Zucco in Atlanta and Thomas Bernhard’s Place of the Heroes, in its premiere at the Comédie-Française in Paris in 2004. As an actor, Mr. Naucyziel has worked with a number of well-established stage and screen directors including Milos Forman and Tsai Ming Liang. Since 2000, he has been lecturing at several universities on the various theatrical arts, and recently received the Villa Medicis Award from the French government. He is the founder and artistic director of Compagnie 41751/Arthur Nauzyciel. Black Battles With Dogs will be presented at the opening of the next Avignon festival 2006, and his next production, The Word, will be premiered at the Avignon Festival in 2007.

Camilla Eeg holds an MA in Performance Studies from New York University. She has been active as an artist, curator, writer and teacher within both the performing arts and visual arts. She trained as a performer at École Jacques Lecoq in Paris between 1990-92, and worked as performer and director in the independent theatre scene in Norway until 1997, when she followed up an academic career. Between 1996-99 Eeg was the artistic and administrative director of Forum for Exchange Between Performing Artists (f.u.s.k.), organizing festivals and international guest performances in Oslo as well as workshops and seminars. In 2002, Eeg was the director of Oslo Kunsthall, an independent project gallery. In 2003 she held a position as Consultant of Information at the National Touring Exhibitions Norway, and between 2004-05 she was head of Interpretation and Information at the project Artistic Interruptions – Art in Nordland. As a scholar and performance theorist Eeg has taught in national art schools and written several articles. Eeg is the editor of the book Dans i samtiden (Spartacus 2006), and is currently working with a book about the Norwegian performance group Baktruppen, as well as being engaged as a dramaturg for the choreographers Ina Christel Johannesen and Karen Foss.

Nina Sun Eidsheim singer, improviser and scholar, approaches both her art and scholarship from multiple angles. Some noteworthy projects are Powering Up/Powering Down, an International Conference on Arts and Technology; the Mapping the Beat Curriculums funded by National

Geographic; and the internationally acknowledged quartet soNu. Eidsheim grew up in Molde and

has for the last seven years resided in California.

She graduated from Adger Music Conservatory (Cand Mag, 1999), California Institute of the Arts (Masters of Music, 2001) and is currently a Ph.D. Candidate at the Critical Studies and Experimental Practices Program at the University of California, San Diego. In her dissertation, she explores how

vocal timbre is an expression of the singer’s personal history, education, geography and the vocal aesthetics with which they have engaged.

Peter Sloth Madsen has been working as an actor, director, dramaturge and project manager within performance theatre, traditional text theatre and forum theatre in Denmark, Norway and Mozambique. He is educated as a dramaturge from Aarhus University and as an actor from Norwegian Theatre Academy in Fredrikstad, Norway. He is currently working as an actor in Copenhagen, devising the production According to the plan in collaboration with fellow actors Ellen Kilsgaard, Pernille Koch, director Adelaide Bentzon and the contemporary Danish writer Jens Blendstrup. Homepage: www.petersloth.dk

Elin Nesje Vestli studied German and Nordic Philology at the University of Oslo, and Theater Studies at the University in Vienna and the University of Berlin. Her Doctoral Thesis (dr. philos.) at the University in Oslo in 1997 was on German political and documentary theatre in the 1960s and 1970s. Vestli is currently professor in German literature and civilization and pro-rector at Østfold University College in Halden.

Chris Graham tells in his biography that he was brought up in the land of Derbyshire coal mines, on a traditional working class diet of chips, corned beef, beans and coca-cola. Chris’s Mum said he was ‘a compliant child, spending hours drawing in front of the television’. As a teenager he was groomed and sexually assaulted by a pedophile, his head popped and he embarked upon ten years of self destruction through substance abuse. He lives in the deprived, under re-generated area left behind when the mining industry collapsed, he continues to draw shit and talk endless bollocks.

Chris Graham reflects how he has survived, so far, in the low paid temporary employment of the working classes. Living on the edge of the welfare state, he has been attempting to break into the art world without having to conform to the usual middle class art bollocks. A Bolsover (Derbyshire) based artist, mixing drawing, painting and performance to provoke dialogue about the connections between consumerism, poverty and the war on terror.

Isabell D. Sterling studied theater at Guildford School of Acting, England. Prior to her studies in England, she was a student at the Nordic Black Theatre, where she continued to work after her study period to set up her own independent productions. Isabell D. Sterling has been part of the multicultural theater milieu since the 1990’s and is one of the founding members of the theater group Queendom. 

Kjetil Skøien  has made performances since 1986, with among other things, the Passage Nord Project, touring in Europe and Japan. He has been a director and a set designer at Det Norske Teatret,

Nationaltheatret, Oslo Nye Teater, Rogaland Teater, and Kaleidoskop Teater, Copenhagen, and has exibited videos, paintings, drawings, and photos at galleries and museums like Museet for Samtidskunst, Kunstnernes Hus, Museum Moderner Kunst, Wien, ICA, London, Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Malmø Konsthall, and Maki Gallery, Tokyo.  Kjetil Skøien’s art is represented at Nasjonalmuseet for Kunst.  His debut as a writer was in 2000 at Aschehoug.

Knut Ove Arntzen is an associate professor in theatre studies at the University of Bergen, Norway. He worked as a theatre critic in Oslo from 1976 to 1986, and has published a long series of essays in Norwegian and international research periodicals on trends and developments within the field of theatre and visual art. He has participated in numerous symposia and conferences of research in theatre and cultural studies, and he has been a visiting professor at universities like Antwerpen, Frankfurt am Main and Kaunas. He is an international research councellor to the Bergen International Theatre.

Gerd Brantenberg was born in Oslo in 1941, but grew up and made her student exam at Fredrikstad Grammar School in 1960, and later graduated as cand. philol. (arts degree) at the University of Oslo in English language and literarure, history, and political science in 1970. She worked as a high school teacher in Oslo, Drammen and Copenhagen before having her Literary debut in 1973. From 1982 she became a full time writer. She also worked as a eminist activist at the Women`s Houses in Copenhagen and Oslo (1972-83), among various activities were the initiation of the Refugee Centre for battered wives and rape victims in Oslo, the foundation of the Women`s High School in Denmark and the Lesbian Movements in Copenhagen (1974) and Oslo (1975). She became board member of the Union of 1948 (gay organisation) in Denmark (1972-3), and The Norwegian Union of 1948 (Norwegian equivalent) (1975-6), trade union representative in the Norwegian Teacher`s Organisation (Norsk Lektorlag) (1978-82), board member of the Norwegian Writer`s Union (1981-83) and co-organiser of the International Feminist Book Fairs in London (1984), Oslo (1986), Barcelona (1990) and Amsterdam (1992). In co-operation with the writer colleagues Sonja Lid, Nina Karin Monsen, Margaret Johansen and publishing editor Gunnel Malmstrøm she participated in the foundation of the Literary Women`s Forum in 1978 and was active in its administration and activities till its end in 1991. Brantenbergs`s literary works contains 10 books/novels, 2 plays, 2 translations, various songs and short stories. All her novels have been translated into other languages, some of them in many editions.The satire Egalia`s Daughters from 1977, a satire of the sexes, has pr. 1996 been translated into 10 languages; Swedish, Danish, German, Dutch, English/American, Icelandic, Finnish, Italian, Spanish,  Korean and Serbian.