Tore Vagn Lid is a Norwegian theatre director, playwright, musician, and artistic director of Transiteatret-Bergen. Tore Vagn Lid holds a professorship in dramaturgy at the National Academy of the Arts in Oslo. He earned a PhD from the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen, Germany. Central in what is seen as a new political turn in the contemporary Norwegian theater. He has also written numerous articles, especially focusing on the relationship between theater and music, musicdramaturgy and musical strategies for theater directing. In October 2011 Lid published his book on music theatre aesthetics and dramaturgy called "Gegenseitige Verfremdungen - Theater als kritischer Erfahrungsraum im Stoffwechsel zwischen Bühne und Musik".
Major concepts
In 2008 Lid was selected to the program "Young directors project" for the Salzburg Festival with his staging of Brecht/Eislers play The Measures Taken. The theater suite Elephant Stories was an audio-visual confrontation between the theater room and a "new naturalism" represented by the new neuro-sciences. Following up this critical discussion, he used Gerhart Hauptmanns naturalistic piece Before Sunrise as a prism towards an upcoming new naturalism . Under the motto "Theatre in times of crisis" Lid constructed Brechts "Fatzer" for the Bergen International Festival 2012 recognized in both Norwegian and German press . During 2012 - 2013 Vagn Lid has developed a trilogy called "Games of sorrow". In his music-dramaturgical conception, Lid searches for, and tries to articulate... "the individuals inside the systems and, the other way around, the systems inside the individuals". The concept attempts "to overcome the gap between the typical individualization of the "classical" theatre on the one hand, and the statistical abstractions of the "documentary" theatre, on the other". The first of Vagn Lids Games of Sorrow was STRAFF, performed for the first time at Logen Teater in Bergen, September dato 2012. The second one was "KILL THEM ALL!" written for, and performed at Nationaltheatret in Oslo, February 2013, both receiving outstanding reviews, and released discussions also outside Norway . The last part of the trilogy is "JudasEvangeliet", developed with Transiteatret-Bergen for The Ultima Contemporary Music Festival in Oslo with premiere at the Opera September 11, 2013
Awards
Lid received the Hedda Award in 2008 for his direction of the play Mann=Mann, a cooperation between Transiteatret-Bergen and Rogaland Teater.
In 2012 Tore Vagn Lid received both Nordic Radio Play-award and the NRK Bluebird award for his radio-play produced and sent by . The radio play was also promoted as Norwegian contribution for the 2012 edition.
