When We Dead Awaken (We Have Never Lived)

The jury's
conclusion

Doppelgangster (Australia/UK) and their proposed production «When We Dead Awaken (We Have Never Lived)» immediately stood out to the jury with its playfulness, boldness, and fabulously original take. The company suggests a radical postmodern adaptation of Ibsen’s final and least performed play, transposing the original story to an elite rest and rehabilitation clinic for «the stars and the extremely wealthy» – Resurrection Day Mountain Resort – high up in the mountains of a «very fictional Norway». There, unbeknownst to most, the thawing from the permafrost has begun to send bodies down the mountainside. The dead from the black plague are returning, and they’recoming for us – especially for the ultra rich. In an almost surreal reality of war and political turmoil across large parts of the globe, many of us might feel like we’re standing right on the threshold of humanity’s finale. From an environmental point of view, the consequences of previous actions are already haunting us – all while the rich and powerful seems to be making new, fateful mistakes. Drawing on critical nostalgia and hauntology as a theoretical basis, Doppelgangster will investigate the conflict between legacy and sacrifice, exploitation and consequence, past and future. Add bold goth aesthetics, black metal music, and dark humour to the mix, and we’re entering a world where Ibsen is radically deconstructed, new characters appear and roles are modernised and inverted. This project is not only intriguing in its form, it oozes cutting-edge creativity and feels extremely timely and urgent: The ghosts are catching up with us – and we need to face them.


About the project

“a ghost never dies, it remains always to come and to come back” – Derrida

A contemporary black metal/dream-pop musical about crisis.

When We Dead Awaken (We Have Never Lived) is an anarchic collision of nightmarish songs, video installation, and postdramatic sabotage from the ‘wildly entertaining and wildly experimental’ team from Naarm/Melbourne (Australia), ripping up Ibsen’s ‘When We Dead Awaken’ (1899). Welcome to Resurrection Day, an isolated mountain resort with a mountain troll, a ghost, a nun with a long gun, a legion of 14th Century Norwegian plague dead, and an audience.
The performance is a hauntological raging on how we imagine our deaths and the end of the planet. It is about hope and hate and necromancy. The work is set on the catastrophic stage of the disinformation age, its vicious inequality, and melting glaciers.
In keeping with their spectacular site-specific experiments, and following their recent controversial in-theatre projects, Doppelgangster deliver a form-twisting experience for an audience up-close, informed by ecological research into grief, atmosphere, and the sensory aesthetics of climate anxiety.
They’re ripping out the stalls, erecting a mountain plateau, and everyone – including the audience – will be buried in the avalanche.
When We Dead Awaken (We Have Never Lived) is a summit for the dead.
Tickets are unavailable for the living. Get in, we’re going up the mountain.
“I wanted to stab you in the back” – Irene (When We Dead Awaken, Ibsen)

Doppelgangster
Doppelgangster an international performance collective creating site-responsive work at the intersection of theatre, live art, film, and sound, committed to disruption, provocation, and theatrical sabotage. The company creates work interrogating urgent crises of our time: climate breakdown, forced migration, economic instability, and the violent swirl of misinformation. Their performances are about difficult questions, hard truths, and operational matters.
A collaboration between artists, activists, and academics, since 2015 Doppelgangster have taken their work from shipping containers and car parks to disused factories and grand palaces – challenging expectations of what performance can be and where it can happen. They’re equally at home staging intimate encounters and sprawling civic rituals, and remixing theatrical, digital, and performance contexts into experiences that are urgent, anarchic, and iconoclastic.
When We Dead Awaken (We Have Never Lived) is led by Naarm/Melbourne-based sibling performance artists Tobias and Kerith Manderson-Galvin. Doppelgangster is active across Australia, Europe, and the UK, Doppelgangster is a company-in-residence at Sheffield Hallam University, building on foundations laid with support from National Theatre Wales, and Aberystwyth Arts Centre.