Photo: E. P. Meyer.
CECILIE LØVEID
“I try to get my plays to be something more than a dream. What I write is not reality and not dream either – although dream is also part of our reality. It’s staged life-rituals.”
Cecilie Løveid (born in 1951, grew up in Bergen, Norway, lives in Copenhagen) is a versatile, innovative writer with a rich repertoire. Her work includes poetry, drama, opera libretti, children’s books and texts for dance and performance. Her plays have been performed several times here and abroad, on theatre stages and on radio and television. Cecilie Løveid writes in several genres, but in recent years she has mainly made her mark as a dramatist.
Some of the things that are characteristic of her as a dramatist are her breadth and her experiments, her
willingness to collaborate artistically, to test, question and mix different genres. The dramas are often poetic in form and dream and reality are often mixed.
Løveid’s work is coloured by her interest in women’s attempts to follow their instincts, whether they are sexual, intellectual, creative or biological. Løveid researches the lives of personalities in an attempt to understand who they really are. She immerses herself in the desire that drives the characters. This interest in the motive force behind things also applies to her treatment of the characters in Ophelias: Death by Water Singing.
"Stage" for "Ophlias", in Osnabrück 2009
In my own words:
"I was born in Norway in 1951, was a musicians wife for several years, and lives now as a widow in Copenhagen, Denmark with my youngest daughter and my cats.
I have written poems most of my life, but only published a few volumes of poetry.
My latest volume of poetry is "Nye ritualer", "New rituals". (Kolon, 2008). But, as Steinar Opstad has pointed at, there is pieces of poetry in the center of all my writing.
I wrote my first dramatic pieces during the 1970's, mostly thanks to my contact with Bergen National Theatre, and I thank my international breakthrough to the radio play The Seagull Eaters (Måkespisere) for which I, and the production won the Prix Italy in 1983.
Over the past 25 years, I have tried to develop the theatre text in nearly all dramatic fields. In addition to stage plays, radio plays and television plays, I have written for the experimental stage, included also the opera and modern ballet.
My theatrical writing has won recognition not only in Norway, but also in international contexts, such as the prominent festival Wiener festwochen, Ibsen Festival and, several times in the USA, as well as Sweden and Denmark.
Even when i'm writing "historical drama", as the finished cycle of Baroch Friise, 1993, Maria Q, 1994 and The Rhine Maidens, 1966, my text is open and experimental.
My last play for the theatre is "VISNING" about a sale of a house and the feelings of the future and the past, my last book is poems; "Nye ritualer"- "New rituals", and my latest libretto is for the composer Henrik Hellstenius' modern opera: "Ophelias, Death by Water Singing" after Shakespeare's "Hamlet"".
Picture from ØSTERIG, AUSTRIA, Kaleidoskop 2003.A play on Wittgensten In Norway.