Premiered in 2022, Oblivion marked Alan Lucien Øyen’s third creation for GöteborgsOperans Danskompani. Developed in close collaboration with the dancers, the piece continues Øyen’s exploration of the incessant acceleration of modern life, where memory blurs, reality dissolves, and the human body becomes both archive and witness. With text and direction by Øyen and choreography created together with Daniel Proietto, Oblivion unfolds as a charged hour of theatre and dance that turns contemporary neurosis into poetic stage imagery.
Fragments of memory, woven together with music – so impeccably performed by GöteborgsOperans Danskompani. The result is a dream-like tale about the passing of time which has dissolved into forgetfulness but has left permanent neurotic traces.
The title signals disappearance: things forgotten, numbed, erased. Against Åsmund Færavaag’s skeletal set — outlines of doors, trees, crosses, like the contour drawings of what once was — the performers navigate a landscape that is both empty and overloaded. Words, gestures, and fragments of song circulate like thoughts we cannot silence. In one monologue, the side effects of antidepressants are reeled off as if a litany, placing today’s chemical attempts at control in stark contrast with the uncontrollable body on stage.
What emerges is not a single narrative but a mosaic of scenes that mirror the anxious pulse of our time. Everyday actions dissolve into surreal distortions; tenderness collides with compulsion; numbness tips into hysteria. The dancers move with relentless precision, each phrase pushing toward excess and collapse, embodying the contradictions of life lived at an unbearable speed.
An hour of increasing intensity and tension.
Oblivion ultimately stages a paradox: in the rush to forget, everything lingers. Time itself seems suspended, stretched, made visible through bodies caught between acceleration and stasis.
Oblivion is an ode to the human body and its gestures as narrator.
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