LETS GET WISER TOGETHER

The times we live in are actively producing people who are becoming less capable of thinking complex thoughts.

We have never had access to as much information as we do today. But access to information is not the same as the ability to think.

We have built systems designed to compete for our attention and constantly interrupt us. Before our thoughts have time to become too difficult or demanding, we are called elsewhere, catapulted into new information and new stimuli. At the same time, the flow of news has become so overwhelming that more and more people shut it out altogether.

The platforms we use to make sense of the world favour conflict and simplification, and we increasingly rely on technology that removes the resistance that once forced us to think for ourselves. As a result, we may gradually begin to doubt what we ourselves are capable of. The world has not become any less complex, nor do we lack information or knowledge. And yet, in public discourse, we reward answers before we have understood the questions, making complexity itself invisible.
It is a form of collective dumbing down. And it becomes particularly apparent when we locate the stupidity in others. It is always the others who have been manipulated, the others who lack education and intellectual formation, the others who ought to be challenged.
This collective dumbing down is not solely the fault of the individual. But what we choose to do about it is our shared responsibility.

At the new Betty Nansen Teatret, we are joining the fight: We want to create critical contemporary theatre.

Because theatre, of course, does not exist outside this development. We believe our time needs intellectual and cultural formation. And there can only be room for it when we dare to ask whether our own thoughts, values and institutions also need to be challenged. Because anyone who believes that intellectual formation is something only others lack has already misunderstood the project.

Not all theatre needs to do the same thing. Theatre can entertain, seduce, comfort, disrupt and challenge – or simply allow us to forget ourselves for an evening. It is a strength that the performing arts encompass different artistic visions and ambitions.

But if we want to fight collective dumbing down, it places certain demands on the works we create. They, too, must dare to demand something of their audiences.

The performing arts hold a unique democratic potential: they can bring people together around the same event without requiring them to experience it in the same way. They can give physical form to the forces and power structures that shape our lives. And they can create cracks in the idea that people, power, love and society can only relate to one another in a single way. But none of this happens automatically. Theatre does not become a critical, democratic or formative space simply because a group of people are gathered together in an auditorium. Art does not necessarily become important or relevant simply because it takes place on a stage. Theatre is not above reproducing the comfortable patterns of thought of its time.

We want a theatre that disrupts and deepens the way we see the world, asks questions, and makes room for both doubt and curiosity. A theatre where performances live on as thought and reflection long after they have ended.

We want a theatre that does not simply confirm what we already think and know, or reassure us that we are the good ones. A theatre that examines the conflicts, power structures and conditions of life that shape our time. One that does not merely dramatise the latest headline, but digs deep into everything that has made us who we are and asks why our reality looks the way it does.

We want a theatre where thinking takes place through storms of images, bodies, sounds, spaces, stories, impassioned speeches, emotions and desires. Where time, space and confusion are things we can share.

We want a theatre that does not always look, sound and think like the theatre we already know. A theatre that does not repeat the same images, the same poetry and the same ways of being political. A theatre that invites both artists and audiences to challenge the familiar, without anyone needing to know the answer in advance.

We want a theatre that is courageous: politically, aesthetically and existentially. One that dares to make us uncomfortable, create conflict and change its own direction along the way. We want a theatre that dares to challenge formats, create its own dynamics and insist on its own pace. A theatre that dares to be too intense, too slow, too edgy, too strange – or simply too much.

We do not want to measure the value of a performance by whether everyone goes home satisfied. If they always do, perhaps we have been too careful.

We want a theatre where you do not need to know the history of theatre, have read certain books or understand particular cultural codes in order to feel welcome. We do not require prior knowledge.
But we do ask for your attention, and we invite you to think with us.

Because it is through this shared act of thinking – in the collaboration between stage and audience – that the performance comes into being. And to us, that is one of the most beautiful things about theatre.

We want a theatre where we do not have to agree in order to take part in the same exploration. We do not want to tell you what to think. Because intellectual growth is not about arriving at the same answers, but about deepening our disagreements and enabling us to keep thinking.

Intellectual growth does not belong to the elite. It is a collective project – one that asks something of all of us, but also has room for everyone who wants to take part.