A time capsule from cyberspace

The journey you're invited to join us on this friday began way out rural Pennsylvania, near Amish country, where a young Gabel Eiben heard the ticks and hisses and futuristic bleep and bloops of a dial-up modem opening up the portal to that vast, open cyberspace.

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This week, that young boy, now a fully grown father with an impressive beard and a comprehensive portfolio of stage work, wants to take you to «Cyberia» - a musical memory-lane-trip down the information superhighway.

– I grew up with a lack of connection to the outside world, Gabel explains.

– Now I have a daughter, and I keep thinking about how different her youth will be from mine. That questioning sparked something, back when i started on this project.

Eiben explains that he realized he has a unique outlook, as part of the generation that came of age on either side of the internet's existence. Gabel has spent nine years in New York's theatre scene, then nine years in Brussels. Since 2021, Stavanger is his home, and he has brought his newest project to Dramatikkens hus for a WIP showing this friday.

– «Cyberia» takes us from the nostalgic "Wild West" of the early internet, through the consolidation years when companies learned how to monetize everything, to where we are now... he paused to think.

– We used to have this fantasy of going online, he reflects.

– Now your real life is online, and the fantasy is out in the real world. We spend less time in our actual lives than we do online, Gabel Eiben laughs.

Currently the hall at Dramatikkens hus is rigged up with a drumset, some synthesizers and a microphone. Eiben, who takes particular interest in theatre being what he describes as an “event in the room”, attempts to not create a fiction in what we do on stage.

– Well, maybe a layer of fiction... But there shouldn't be a division between the
artist and the audience, he adds.

– I am calling it an opera, because there is no spoken dialogue, it's all sung. There is no fictionalized dialogue, and i want to have a real interaction with the audience. You could view it as a theatricalized concert, deliberately breaking down the fourth wall. The relationship with the audience should be a two-way conversation, he says.

It's easy then, to let the mind wonder to the concept of the almost ironicgenre of space opera, among which you can count works like Star Wars and Dune, or a thousand cenceptual prog rock albums. For «Cyberia», it wouldn't be too out of place to call it a cyberspace opera!

Gabel Eiben has written the work and will be performing. Composer Robert Johanson has written the music and performs the music on stage, together with drummer Thore Warland. Tale Dolven, Eiben's wife and creative partner in the duo Dolven/Eiben contributes as well.

Welcome to Dramatikkens hus on friday the 20th of march at 14:00.