Unchained Melody – what does the title mean to you, and how is it reflected in the piece?

When I began looking for a title, I knew I wanted it to come from a song, since the entire piece is built around the inseparability of singing and dancing. “Unchained Melody” is the title of a song written in 1955 by Alex North and Hy Zaret, but it has since been recorded in more than 350 versions, making it perhaps one of the most enduring love songs ever written.

The song entered the project through the dancers themselves. Early in the process, I asked each dancer at Carte Blanche to contribute three love songs they could imagine performing on stage. One of the dancers proposed an a cappella version by The Fleetwoods that I found extraordinarily beautiful. In that sense, the song signifies the collaborative nature of the process itself – the way the performance emerged through exchanges with the dancers and through a shared pool of references and songs.

The title also crystallised something I find important in the work, because what is an unchained melody? Is it a melody that is free? One without limits? A melody that lifts you into the sky? Or one marked by longing, pain or feeling blocked? The title captures the double bind that interests me in love: the coexistence of joy and suffering, attachment and loss, elevation and vulnerability.

Can you talk a little about the ideas and concepts behind the piece?

With this piece I wanted to work on the topic of love, but also to use love as a way of thinking about how emotions circulate collectively. We are living in a moment marked by increasing instability and polarisation, where politics themselves have become deeply emotional, perhaps too emotional? I have become increasingly interested in how affect shapes both personal and social relations – how emotions move between people, how they create proximity or distance, identification or resistance.

These are complex questions, and rather than approaching them directly through politics, I chose to approach them through intimacy and love in Unchained Melody. The piece asks whether love can exist beyond the structure of the couple – whether it can become something shared within a group. What kinds of emotional states emerge when affection circulates collectively? And are there any emotions that cannot, in some way, be connected to love?

The work is also concerned with emotional contagion and with the instability of emotional response in theatre. A gesture that invites empathy can suddenly produce discomfort or suspicion instead. I am interested in these oscillations: how audiences mirror what they see, observe or resist it, or become emotionally implicated in it.

Structurally, the piece moves through songs from different historical periods, tracing changing ways of singing about love across centuries. At the same time, the choreography is organised through waves, loops, and repetitions. We worked extensively with the idea of emotional looping – the way one returns obsessively to a song when in love or heartbroken, listening repeatedly either to remember or to forget. The piece therefore unfolds as a kind of emotional tide: songs, gestures, and affects return continuously, but never in exactly the same way.

What kind of experience do you hope audiences will have when watching the piece?

I try not to project too much onto the audience, because every spectator arrives with their own history, sensitivities, and emotional state. A performance is always shaped through that encounter.

What I hope, perhaps, is that people will allow themselves to be moved – emotionally, intellectually, or both. In theatre, emotion is often opposed to thought, but I am interested precisely in the point where feeling and thinking become inseparable, which they of course always are.

The piece creates a space in which emotion can be experienced while also being reflected upon. Through repetition, shifts in tone, and friction between expression and perception, the audience is invited not only to feel, but also to become aware of how feelings operate. Am I drawn toward what is happening on stage, or pushed away from it? Am I mirroring these emotions, questioning them, resisting them?

For me, these questions resonate beyond the theatre itself. They are connected to how we navigate a world that increasingly feels unstable and emotionally charged, and to how emotions shape the ways we relate to one another socially and politically.

Photos: Øystein Haara