dollars fo

DOLLARS (FO)

FAROE ISLANDS, 2009

So you don't live en Denver? Or in Dallas? Don't worry - Greed, seduction, betrayal, revenge is here to turn you and your city into a breathtaking soap opera.

A group of performers spend two weeks in a city turning it into a soap opera. In the morning they start out on the street, remembering their favourit soap opera character. And a hunt to find the local equivalents begins. They find tycoons, homosexual sons, rebelious daughters, evil ex-wifes, and engages them in making a soap opera about their lives. And so they discover the passions, secrets and rivalries of your city and turn them into a soap opera plot.

During the day they enter homes, offices, factories in your city and shoot an episode of the soap opera, making the citizens stars and making the city's stories into enjoyable fiction. And in the evening they invite everybody to see themselves or their friends, nabours, enemies or secret loves in an episode of the soap that portraits your city.

Next day they start over again, finding characters for the next episode...

Dollars - Greed, seduction, betrayal, revenge is a performance that uses theatre and television aesthetics to engage the citizens of a city to portrait themselves and the place they live.

A soap opera contains romance, greed, jealousy, betrayal, revenge, crime and true love quite openly. As a modern saga, it is not affraid of anything, and it doesn't pass judgement on its characters. This performance uses the open-minded-ness of the soap opera to invite people into participating and sharing their stories. In this way it produces a description of the local community that at the same time is highly fictionalised and very true.

It is produced in a series of two-day production units. First days focus on preparation and casting locals for the roles of soap opera character. The search will have a known soap opera character as reference. A search for ”a Fallon character” would send the performer into the city looking for a young, sexualy liberated, rebellous young woman, that would want to participate in the soap episode. Each participant is then interviewed with the themes that the original character encorporates as the focal point. In this example it would e.g. be the relations between generations in the city, the youths view on sexuality and gender and so forth.

With these three persons and their stories, a script for the episode is created during the afternoon. Every constallation of characters highlights certain tensions and conflicts in the city, which are put into a very stringent, soap opera dramaturgy, seasoned with small personal details from the participants. In this way an efficiant, personal, new and localy relevant script is produced during the afternoon.

On second days the episode is shot with the locals participants as main characters. These everyday people are guided through the recordings by the perfomers who deliver lines and stage directions into their ears through in-ear equipment.

And during second days afternoons the material is edited into a 20 minutes episode of 'your local soap opera' that is presented to the public and all participants in a glorious premiere show in the evening, presenting the local stories and conflicts in a humourous, highly fictionalized manner, that turns everybody into a tv-star and attach the freeing feeling of 'what happens next?' to the lives of the citizens and the city itself.

Performers

Beinta K. Clothier

Gry Guldager-Jensen

Marita Dalsgaard

21 helt fantastiske færinger

Concept and directing

Tue Biering

Jeppe Kristensen

Set and costumedesign

Siri Vilbøl

Editing

Dorrit Andersen