Our cultural friends in the North

Apr 28 2008 by Phil Key, Liverpool Daily Post

Philip Key takes a stroll around Old Stavanger, to see what our title rival has to offer

IT WAS the European Capital of Culture as you might never have imagined it, with cobbled streets, wooden houses, a museum celebrating the sardine canning business and a booming oil industry.

What many in Liverpool may have not realised is that there are actually two European Capitals of Culture in 2008, Liverpool being one and Stavanger, in Norway, the other. This was Stavanger.

It is a very different world, as I discovered when I spent a few days in the Norwegian town, part of a larger region which has joined in the celebrations. It is also a European capital of culture which is not part of the European Union.

When I arrived, they were still talking about a weekend Capital of Culture event in March in which the audience had to ski or climb high into the mountains surrounding the town where a huge amphitheatre had been built of snow.

Around 90 performers – dancers, ski-acrobats, musicians and singers – had appeared in a multimedia spectacle with projections, lights and extreme snowboarders flying from the slopes. It had been a big success.

Like Liverpool, Stavanger started the year on the weekend of January 12 with a big opening ceremony in the streets with a parade of 2,000, an orchestra boat on wheels and – naturally – lots of fireworks. Again, like in Liverpool, the streets were packed with performers and watchers.

The artistic director for Stavanger is a Scottish woman, Mary Miller, who has managed to retain her job from day one.

But before I went to meet her to discover what was happening in their capital of culture, I wanted to take a look at Stavanager itself.

The town centre is the harbour, which comes right up to the town square overlooked by its cathedral.

It was on the waterfront that I made my base in the impressive Skagen Brygge Hotel, all wood on the outside, plush inside. From my window, I could observe the boats coming back from fjord trips and large ships involved in the oil business.

This mixture of tourism and industry is an intriguing one although the town centre’s emphasis seemed to be on the former with its small shops, malls and bars.

Life in Stavanger is certainly taken at a slower pace than Liverpool, and there is no part that looks overcrowded. Indeed, it is more like an English suburb than a big town.

But looks can be deceptive and the region actually has 26 municipalities, all of which were involved in that opening ceremony. So there are a lot of people around.

Alongside the harbour is a familiar-looking statue, just like one of those Iron Men created by Antony Gormley on the Crosby shore. In fact, this IS an Antony Gormley statue and, like the Iron Men, one of many.

One of my Stavanger guides, Per Morten Haar, was happy to explain that it was Stavanger which first had the Crosby statues where they were situated along the shoreline. Like the people of Liverpool, they rather liked them but they had to be uprooted for Crosby.

In their place, they got Gormley’s Broken Column, a series of 23 cast-iron figures that stretch from the Rogaland Art Museum to the harbour, taking in places like the courts and a churchyard on the way. There is even one in a private house.

THESE figures, like Liverpool’s, were based on a cast of Gormley’s own body but with an essential difference. In Liverpool, the naked figures have full anatomical equipment, while the Stavanger figures seem to be wearing bathing trunks.

At one stage during my stay, I took to the air in a helicopter to observe one of the year of culture events that can only be seen from the sky – apparently visitors arriving by aircraft could see it, but I must have been at the wrong window.

This was a collection of 600 white bales of hay that had been laid out in a field to spell out the first stanza of a poem by local poet and national hero Arne Garborg, whose statue stands in the town centre. The poem, Sunset Joy, was taken from an 1895 collection and deals with a fantastical elf land.