Oslo City Hall, land of old and new

Saturday, 15 september

Oslo

Remember those old movies you saw in junior high about other cultures and other countries? In which the narrator said things like “San Francisco, land of old and new,” to compare Mission Dolores with the new Transit Center? OK, maybe you don’t remember.

Oslo’s city hall was completed only after WWII, and its external architecture doesn’t wow me

but it does have a great set of murals (actually carved in wood) illustrating Nordic myths. This one has Odin on his eight-legged horse

with his two ravens (Hugin — thought, and Munin — memory) flying above him.

Inside, one first enters a great hall with a grand staircase (just outside the photo, to the right) leading to the various commemorative rooms and meeting chambers.

Look carefully at the bottom of the photo for a foreshadowing of the “new” aspect of the building.

But first, more of the “old” aspects. This room is named for Edvard Munch, whose painting “The Scream” is not typical of many other works:

In other rooms, there are decorations that I liked:

and, closer up:

with springy reindeer.

Back to the main hall. As we entered, a dance performance had just begun. There were about six dancers, and a very gloomy, loud, and completely unmelodic audio track. The featured character, however, was a very large, inflated, pulsing black plastic bag:

blobbing around on the floor in front of the audience. From time to time, a few dancers would appear to be deposited from the bag onto the floor in various poses. A dancer also occasionally ran around the space, clearly disturbed by the bag and running to escape its amorphous clutches. The performance went on and on, with no relief from the gloomy roaring sound, and (louts that we are) we could see no story arc or emotional progression. So we went up the stairs and saw what had been well hidden from the audience,

namely the dancers and one very fit bag manipulator, keeping the action going.

We went into the rooms described earlier, then after at least 15 minutes returned to the staircase as the dancers had apparently completed their vanquishing of the bag: