Play on illusion and on how the subconscious mind may act as a projector for images of stars, sky, desert landscapes and the personal story of individuals, this is what we find in MaisonDahlBonnema’s pop-opera series. [...] I prefer to understand this pop-opera series on the basis of an animated or artificial landscape that opens for a conception of art related to the fantastic as well as to the surreal and the geographical. In this series the landscape of the physical body is made up of how the actor or dancer’s figurative expression through movements and patterns of movements reflect the personal or autobiographical in relation to their identities or in relation to the identity of others. In these forms of expressive art, theatre and visual arts have joined into hybrid forms, such as we know from performance art and visual dramaturgic expressions – or, if you please, post-dramatic theatre. The post-dramatic however, is a paradox, since the genre of opera is working precisely with dramatic clichés and with melodrama. The fragmented, the playfulness and the ironic involvement characterises “Analysis – the Whole Song”. Like in earlier productions, the fantastic video animations made by Jan Bultheel are in dialogue with the acting in the stage room and simultaneously is a basis for the acting on stage. The animations created by help of surprising and astonishing computer made 3D-effects. The production opens with a libretto where Anneke Bonnema sings of how lonely she feels and how therapy made her come out of the depression, but has she come to any final conclusion in her relation to the complex, down-going consumer society bombarded by the financial crisis? No, but Karl Marx makes his entry, accompanied by the dwarf Sigmund Freud. Here Marx and Freud are two different characters that are enacted in Bultheel’s 3D animation film. This animation film is what becomes the analysis or the psychoanalysis, so to say. The result of it is that the Ricky and Ronny-couple venture into the desert in search of silence and tranquillity – and they venture into an imaginative landscape. They are thus abandoning the sophisticated urban environment that they have been cultivating as their real identity. The cultivation of urbanism may be symbolically represented in the urban complex of the cities London-Paris-New York. But, just as they’re both singing: …”we go to the desert, we drive the car very fast and we make love – and we are crushing everything”, and then it is evident that David Cronenberg’s film “Crash”, based on a novel by J. G. Ballard, is hovering in the background as source of inspiration or parallel. In the desert they can drive fast and uninhibitedly in the embrace of their passion. It is a condition characterised by the pop-surrealistic paradise of the subconscious. But the dreamlike condition ends when they crash their car in the middle of Times Square. This production is well sung, it is well written and in a very interesting dialogue with the 3D animation film. Its weakness is maybe that its world of icons is too well known, but again, the strong side of this is that the producers make the well-known icons astonishingly present. Further on, there is a tantalising onset inherent in the connection between urbanity, cultural landscapes and identities. Truly we know a lot of this from so many films – but here it is presented on a gold platter as pop-opera with an obviously surrealistic touch to it. This pop-opera series may guide your way to knowledge of more of the music theatre-genre. And for myself I am still a postmodernist and cultivate irony – even though I know that the more explicit neo-political, neo-documentary and spiritual is on its way into present day theatre. Still this production was to me one of the best from the Meteor Festival 2011. The complete article was published in Norsk Shakespeare- og teatertidsskrift (NSTT, no 3-4, 2011). Editor in chief: Therese Bjørneboe.