Friday 26 February 2010

Rockets Through Red Rooms

Tonight we played at Berns Salonger, a beautiful theater built in about 1860. As the prominent entertainment facility in this fairly small (albeit cosmopolitain) city, you can imagine it has seen its fair share of drama. Drama in every sense. Bergman might have orchestrated an extramarital intrigue from within its luxuriant walls, on his way to siring one of the many children now fighting over his estate. Who knows?
The place is the also actual setting for August Strindberg's Red Rooms. In this influential bit of early naturalist writing, the poor and marginalised bohemian class remained upstairs in the small Red Rooms off of the balcony (and off their heads much of the time), freestyling poems and songs which they would take down onto the floor of wealthy sophists, offering them up in exchange for dinner or another round. Much later, my girlfriend's parents met here, so I am grateful for its existence in that respect also, it encourages decadence.
Our lighting technician commits some marvellous acts of overindulgence as well, see below.


Tobias is pretty much THE MAN as far as lights go, I met him during a tour we did with Lykke Li and we hit it off. "Technician" is a bit of an understatement actually. Artist is far more appropriate: I knew from the unique spacing and density of his tatoos that he had amazing taste, and fortunately for us he found time in between FEVER RAY tours to work with us. I will put more video up as soon as I have.