How can you express your inner feelings and thoughts? You are pissed off because someone has hurt you. You are happy, because you come from a lovely love meeting. You’re sad because you’ve lost a close friend. You’re worried, because you do not see how to get out of a bad fix at your job. You are determined. You know how to deal with it! How do you give expression to this?
Louise Halvardsson has gone through all this in her life. And she continues to go through things, she continues to happen to expose herself to everything that creates strong feelings and reactions in life. When she comes out on the other side – either tired, sad and angry, or proud and happy – she also wants to share her feelings with us others. She wants to create compassion, she wants to give courage, she wants to share her joy and her energy and anger.
How would you express things like these if you wanted to? Would you put it in writing? In words? Would you play your sadness and your joy on your flute or trombone? Would you sing – wild, angry and full of joy? Would you, slowly and emphatically, read what you thought and felt in poetic form from the scene so that everyone of us would hear it? Or would you dare to just stand there and let your body and spirit breathe out all that you’ve got inside of you?
Louise Halvardsson does all this. She stands silently for a while letting us take in her presence. Us. We – an audience of librarians, language teachers, writers of children’s books, cartoonists – all of us who may want facts about how to write and how to find easy-to-read literature for young people. And she wants to prepare us for experiencing. Experiencing how life itself feels, because that’s what we need to learn to communicate to one another.
Louise Halvardsson presents herself as a poet. She is a ”Punk Industrial Hard Rocker with an Attitude”. She has a background in Poetry Slam. Her art is performance poetry and she does workshops in poetry at schools and in cultural associations. Making poetry should be fun. It should be easy. Making poetry is to dare confronting serious subjects.
No, she doesn’t have a flute or trombone on stage. But when she begins, she uses herself, her voice, her body and her gestures as an instrument that expresses her innermost thoughts and feelings. She speaks, she dances, she sings, she recites a poem, and mediates the sorrow, the anger, the courage and the joy she can have within her. And she tells us how she meets young people who never read a book, but who all of a sudden find a way to express their feelings and thoughts.
Dear reader! How do you express your inner feelings and thoughts? You are pissed off because someone has hurt you. You are happy, because you come from a lovely love meeting. You’re sad because you’ve lost a close friend. You’re worried, because you do not see how to get out of a snap you’ve got into. You’re determined. You know how to deal with it! How do you express this?
Ellington