AGAINST ALL ODDS is a performance about the future that, according to the statistics, awaits today’s Norwegian children. On the Main Stage at Rogaland Teater, 22 brave children bring the statistics to life by putting themselves and their own stories into play. Behind the cold facts are life stories filled with hope, but also challenges and harsh realities. The performance and the children ask: Can the patterns shown by the statistics be broken? And are people more alike across social classes than might be expected?
In Norway, there is an idea that everyone starts out with equal opportunities regardless of background. But the statistics tell a different story. Almost 40% of children whose parents are outside the labour market have no formal education by the age of 26. And the higher the social class a child grows up in, the higher their school grades tend to be. Can children’s futures be influenced at all, or is their fate already determined by who their parents are and where and how they grow up?
Based on social background, the Danish production company Fix+Foxy creates a picture of the children’s future using statistical calculations.
Statistics are a tool for collecting data that makes it possible to make predictions about the future. But when statistics are placed under a microscope, the numbers begin to dissolve, and graphs, pie charts, columns and groups of little stick figures become real people.
It can be both frightening and unsettling to put faces to statistical data concerning income, participation in the labour market, health, life expectancy, mental health, fertility and substance abuse. But that is precisely what the Danish production company Fix+Foxy does in the critically acclaimed and award-winning production AGAINST ALL ODDS. Local children aged 10–13 take to the stage as themselves and as representatives of the social class they statistically belong to. In this way, they bring the statistics to life and offer hope and strength by taking different positions on the cold facts.
The result is a provocative, compelling and moving performance which, against all odds, is also full of hope, possibilities and future pattern-breakers. The production won the Danish theatre award Reumert for Production of the Year in 2019, while the concept’s creator and director, Tue Biering, received the Danish Crown Prince Couple’s Culture Award in 2022. The production is co-produced by Fix+Foxy and Rogaland Teater.
AGAINST ALL ODDS is based on extensive research from Statistics Norway (SSB), Fri fagbevegelse, Ungdata, the Norwegian Social Research Institute (NOVA) and the University of Stavanger (UiS).
Age limit: 15
Please note that this performance will be conducted in Norwegian.
