(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
It already starts on the plane. The sense of adventure. Not the usual travel adventure, but the island community adventure, the crazy man adventure and the mininorge adventure far out in the ocean. And then of course, a fairy tale mix of domestic hardanger dialects, Dutch and Icelandic. A humpet titan language. American-blissful rs, irs and clocks on a multitude of words, and a bouncy, cheerful tone. The flight attendants want us welcome aboard Atlantic Seaways, in the language that can be called Scandinavian – Faroese adapted to Scandinavia, officially called Gothic Danish. Free alcohol, free minimums, tea and coffee – included return trip. A little dream for us who are used to Norwegians expensive menu cards, and for all the thirsty Faroese men who fly home from Norwegian shelf work this Friday night. It is week shift! A gin tonic bubble, a language play bubble that envelops us throughout the journey, from the moment we disappear into a thick, cotton-proof mist layer, abruptly land on a runway – an asphalted Atlantis inside the fog wall – into the tax-free shop, into the taxi and on through a constantly fog-covered, tan and three-ribbed lunar landscape on the road to Torshavn. The Faroe Islands are an adventure island kingdom. And on banners around Torshavn it says "Welcome to DAGARNAR: Nordic Performing Arts Days 2016". Makes sense to Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic games. And we also came here to play!
The Faroe Islands finally have started to focus on culture, says Merda, the Faroese-Danish director of the festival's opening piece Veitslan or The party. Merda usually lives in Copenhagen, but has gathered a bunch of Nordic actors to create the show. Icelandic, Danish, Greenlandic and Faroese actors, a Danish composer, a Danish lighting designer, and a Norwegian scenographer – which is also my ticket into the adventure. For two days before the festival opening, while the Nordic family is practicing family drama The party in the modest premises of Tjodpallur – the national theater – I walk around Torshavn and meditate on Faroese words. It is clear that North-Eastern games are pre-Russian. I interpret Faroese words and play with the idea of what the theater really is: To droyma. To think big. And gradually, far and wide, it says in the program for the festival. Can the theater be the entrance to an unknown society and tell something basic about it?
The party is based on the films Festen av Thomas Vinterberg sum in 1999 won the golden palm trees. The party is a family drama in Ibsenian tradition: The father turns 65 years and is about to celebrate, and the eldest son, Christian, holds the speech that reveals a great secret, his father's sexual assault against him and his twin sister Linda, who committed suicide a few years earlier. In an alcoholic jumble of screaming, singing, joking and shouting, the mother who in a new speech explains that Christian has always had difficulty distinguishing between reality and fantasy, eviction of Christian and then more scowling and singing, the party continues, until it the youngest sister reads Linda's suicide note telling the truth about her father's actions. The screaming turns into melancholy Faroese folk song and then Greenlandic shamanistic healing song. The party is over. The masks have fallen. Then The party was set up for the first time this fall, it was over 5000 that saw it – an overwhelming number in the Faroese context, says Merda. A theatrical success! Why does a story strike like that The party in an island kingdom like the Faroe Islands? Does this mean that this story is typical of the Faroe Islands? What about all the other stories? I get curious about what else is hiding behind the windswept mask in this archipelago, and start exploring, that is, I'm beginning to dream: What adventures are typically Faroese?
Maybe the whaling adventure – Gravel whales being hunted into bays, slaughtered on the quays and used, for example, in a whale pot served by Merda's mother to the entire company after the premiere, or the salmon adventure: Unlike the West's sanctions on Russia in recent years, large quantities of farmed salmon are exported to shrewd Russians or turns into salmon tartar at the good sushi restaurant in Torshavn. Or the brand-new-cars adventure – always traffic, always polished, scratch-free SUVs – on the main roads out of Torshavn to the neighboring islands, where northern country houses cling to a creek or a valley. Or the rhubarb adventure – just about the only hardhausen of a plant that can grow in this uncultivated land; gourmet adventure – Coke, perhaps, a Michelin restaurant situated on the hill above Torshavn and offering Faroese prey of stream-swept ocean bottom and tar tar forest, prey some of the seasons and Føroyum, but is just an expensive dream for a poet; the Danish design adventure – the architect-designed 70-century house for Merda's parents where not a single kitchen door knob is random and all the lamps are Louis Poulsen's; or what about the 2000 Missing Women Adventure – Faroese women who travel to Denmark and dance, and then Thai women who Faroese themselves. Are these the true adventures of the Faroe Islands? But which one should I immerse myself in, and which further? To droyma. To think. What do I want to remember from the Faroe Islands?
It is now, at the top of the mountain, that it clears completely, and a true adventure spreads out before me.
We take off a few hours, from theater and thinking, to dreaming of the Faroese adventure. Boat trip out to Nólsoy, a small island just outside Torshavn. 250 residents, one road of 200 meters, four cars, 100 sheep and one café with rye waffles and rhubarb brazilian jam. We hike over the peat slopes, low-growing heather and moss covering almost the whole island, past grazing sheep and jerky kittens, up the mountain. We're lucky: The fog has eased long ago, the sky is huge, the scenery is spectacular. And we see. We see the Faroe Islands. We see rocks, bird cliffs, caves, fjords, sea. We see the treeless, windswept, sea-salted landscape. And it is now, at the top of the mountain, that it clears completely, and a true adventure spreads out before me, unfinished and bare, an adventure told straight into my eyes, without ornament or irony, without morals or psychology, it is now the adventure becomes reality – for this is what is the Faroese uneasy adventure: nature. For a moment it's clear. That nature is both the fairy tale and the truth about the Faroe Islands. And then we dream further. We rent a car and drive through nature. Over the mountains, past valleys, small villages, stop at the vantage points along the road and the old disused NATO building at the top of Sornfelli. And we no longer dream, we look beyond: a real dream landscape. A bare land, a bare-headed land. When did the mountains start losing their hair? Is there really not a single tree here? The thin peony vegetation forms a soft veil over the landscape. From the summit of Sornfelli, the mountains are soft and organic, brown and warm towards the blue sea, some places with distinctive tips or a sharp spine. The mountains are expensive. Large coiled dinosaurs that have laid to rest, with their head and tail under water. We just see their backs on them, breathing heavily in line with the ocean. We see the typical staircase structure in the mountains; deep engravings that form stripe patterns, from the sea level up to the highest peaks of around 800 meters, distinctive lines marking the island's millennial periodic rise from the sea. How many islands can we see? We see the sea that surrounds all the islands. Is it the same sea as eight million years ago? We see the waves thundering towards steep cliffs, again and again, we hear the banging of the sea muscles digging out caves. Who sighs into the mountain, eats off the stones. The Faroe Islands are getting smaller, Merda says. The sea is about to take Atlantis back.
We drive on. Through a long underwater tunnel to Streymoy's neighboring island, Vágar, and the outermost small village of Gásadalur, which you could reach on foot until 2006. 12 house and 50 sheep. Six benches for tourists who want to sit for a while and stare. On the view. Sea. Øyformasjonene. The edge at the cliffs. No fences. The rush of the wind. The blows from the waves. The subtle song from the tent. This is to droyma. And a dragonfly from the sea far down there propagates up the cliffs, past the bird's nest, up to the grass, my feet, and groans me violently in my stomach. This is reality. And this is to think: One heather plant that I dig up with the roots and take home to the garden.
