Our cultural friends in the North
Apr 28 2008
by Phil Key, Liverpool Daily Post
Philip Key takes a stroll around Old Stavanger, to see what our title rival has to offer
IT WAS the European Capital of Culture as you might never have imagined it, with cobbled streets, wooden houses, a museum celebrating the sardine canning business and a booming oil industry.
What many in Liverpool may have not realised is that there are actually two European Capitals of Culture in 2008, Liverpool being one and Stavanger, in Norway, the other. This was Stavanger.
It is a very different world, as I discovered when I spent a few days in the Norwegian town, part of a larger region which has joined in the celebrations. It is also a European capital of culture which is not part of the European Union.
When I arrived, they were still talking about a weekend Capital of Culture event in March in which the audience had to ski or climb high into the mountains surrounding the town where a huge amphitheatre had been built of snow.
Around 90 performers – dancers, ski-acrobats, musicians and singers – had appeared in a multimedia spectacle with projections, lights and extreme snowboarders flying from the slopes. It had been a big success.
Like Liverpool, Stavanger started the year on the weekend of January 12 with a big opening ceremony in the streets with a parade of 2,000, an orchestra boat on wheels and – naturally – lots of fireworks. Again, like in Liverpool, the streets were packed with performers and watchers.
The artistic director for Stavanger is a Scottish woman, Mary Miller, who has managed to retain her job from day one.
But before I went to meet her to discover what was happening in their capital of culture, I wanted to take a look at Stavanager itself.
The town centre is the harbour, which comes right up to the town square overlooked by its cathedral.
It was on the waterfront that I made my base in the impressive Skagen Brygge Hotel, all wood on the outside, plush inside. From my window, I could observe the boats coming back from fjord trips and large ships involved in the oil business.
This mixture of tourism and industry is an intriguing one although the town centre’s emphasis seemed to be on the former with its small shops, malls and bars.
Life in Stavanger is certainly taken at a slower pace than Liverpool, and there is no part that looks overcrowded. Indeed, it is more like an English suburb than a big town.
But looks can be deceptive and the region actually has 26 municipalities, all of which were involved in that opening ceremony. So there are a lot of people around.
Alongside the harbour is a familiar-looking statue, just like one of those Iron Men created by Antony Gormley on the Crosby shore. In fact, this IS an Antony Gormley statue and, like the Iron Men, one of many.
One of my Stavanger guides, Per Morten Haar, was happy to explain that it was Stavanger which first had the Crosby statues where they were situated along the shoreline. Like the people of Liverpool, they rather liked them but they had to be uprooted for Crosby.
In their place, they got Gormley’s Broken Column, a series of 23 cast-iron figures that stretch from the Rogaland Art Museum to the harbour, taking in places like the courts and a churchyard on the way. There is even one in a private house.
THESE figures, like Liverpool’s, were based on a cast of Gormley’s own body but with an essential difference. In Liverpool, the naked figures have full anatomical equipment, while the Stavanger figures seem to be wearing bathing trunks.
At one stage during my stay, I took to the air in a helicopter to observe one of the year of culture events that can only be seen from the sky – apparently visitors arriving by aircraft could see it, but I must have been at the wrong window.
This was a collection of 600 white bales of hay that had been laid out in a field to spell out the first stanza of a poem by local poet and national hero Arne Garborg, whose statue stands in the town centre. The poem, Sunset Joy, was taken from an 1895 collection and deals with a fantastical elf land.
Alas, the installation was only temporary and disappeared as farmers used the hay, so there were just a few words left when I visited, and it is expected to have totally vanished by now.
The air trip – despite rain and wind – did give me an opportunity to see the land around, beaches, lighthouses, tiny islands, private houses (most, strangely enough, with a trampoline in the back garden) and the busy harbour itself.
Back at my hotel base, I was delighted to find a jazz band from Bergen playing in the bar, the hotel staging regular jazz sessions for what seemed to be a delighted audience. Stavanger was obviously not the sleepy town I at first imagined.
It has its old town, a place full of wooden buildings dating from the end of the 18th century delightfully situated just above the harbour, most of them incongruously sporting television aerials. It is an expensive part of town to live and, with strict restrictions on building, the result is that many look quite splendid, others a little ramshackle.
It was also here that I came across the Norwegian Canning Museum, celebrating one of the town’s biggest incomes at one time, sardines.
It was here that they were salted, smoked and beheaded before being put into those famous cans, and visitors can try packing plastic versions of the fish themselves.
There is no longer a sardine industry in the town and, during my visit, Norway’s last canning factory in Bergen was due to close.
Today, Stavanger is known for its fine dining and restaurants, and those I tried like Hall Tolov and Tango certainly put on a good show, often of the nouvelle cuisine variety, ie, small but delicious portions. Fish is certainly fresh, and the cod I had at Hall Tolov was the best I have ever eaten.
In a town of museums, the Norwegian Petrol Museum is certainly worth a visit, a modern place full of models of oil derricks, boats, panoramas, rock samples and even a 3-D film about oil exploration in the area.
Alongside they were building a Geopark, an innovative idea in which an activity park for youngsters was being created out of old machinery and parts donated by the oil industry. It was still under construction when I was there, but should be open by now.
Then it was time to meet Mary Miller, the artistic director of Stavanger’s Culture Year. Her office in the centre of town is just above an old bank.
As in Liverpool, there had been a few grumbles about the Culture Year, but generally people are enjoying it, she said. It is being marketed under the title Open Port.
“Because of the oil industry, Stavanger was already known as the energy capital of Europe,” she says. “Now that power is culture.”
Interestingly, she had been in touch in the early days with Robyn Archer, Liverpool’s first artistic director, and an old friend. “We had been planning a few joint ventures but, when Robyn went, it was not to be.”
But there is still a pretty full programme of events, with four artistic residencies at the heart of it with visits from a dance company from Israel, a theatre group from Lithuania, a music theatre company from Belgium and a puppet group from South Africa. Each is creating three productions during their stays.
There will be an open-air theatre project involving fairy tales, three peace events, a folk design exhibition and an art project in which the public is invited to help create various pieces of public art. There is also a lot of music, film and sport.
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As with Liverpool, there is a desire to leave a legacy from the year and Miller was particularly keen on the Norwegian Wood project (nothing to do with The Beatles, she hastily pointed out).
As the town boasts the largest number of wooden buildings in Northern Europe, they thought they should have more, so architects were asked to design new ones.
By the end of the year, it is hoped there will be new houses, kindergartens, open-air stages and bridges. There will even be a new cabin at the region’s most inspirational tourist spot, Pulpit Rock, a rock which hovers high above a fjord.
It is a very different programme from Liverpool, perhaps a little more earnest but still with a sense of fun at times.
I went to the Rogaland Art Museum, where artist Shu Lea Cheang had created an installation titled Babylove. This features some giant cups and saucers, each with a giant baby inside. But the fun part comes when visitors are allowed to step into the cups and drive them around the gallery rather like dodgem cars. Crazy but highly entertaining.
"Our cultural friends in the North." Apr 28 2008 by Phil Key, Liverpool Daily Post ...
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