Festival a/d Werf 2010 Side Program

This year, the side program offered a layer of reflexion to the artistic program of Festival a/d Werf. Through straightforward and insightful conversations, some of the artists of the festival explained their artistic quests, their working processes, and the ideas that fuel their practices. Besides this, the Performance Studies International conference, which will take place next during within Festival a/d Werf 2011, was officially announced.

The HOPE DEBATE consisted of a series of three public interviews, where Elke van Campenhout discussed with James Beckett, performers from Lone Twin Theatre, and Dries Verhoeven the possibility of hope as an artistic practice. The interview with James was conducted on the set design of his performance Zakłady na Życie (Plant Life). With the his characteristic clarity, he explained his approach to his work: “A healthy intellectual will maintain a curiosity for everything. But when it comes to creative work, it helps to limit yourself and make very specific choices in order to develop a style.” In the second interview, Elke approached the performers from Lone Twin in a playful way, and requested them to choose questions from a piece of paper to read to one another. On the third one, she and Dries Verhoeven were both blindfolded, as they explored the complexities of hope within intercultural communication, as exemplified by the performance Life Streaming from Dries Verhoeven.

Next to these debates, Branka Zgonjanin and Pere Faura, choreographers and students from the Amsterdam Masters of Choreography, interviewed Fanni Futterknecht, Joao Evangelista, Dries Verhoven, Inari Salmivaara, María Jerez Quintana, Min Kyoung Lee, and Jean Baptiste Veyret-Logerias (these last three being performers from Five People). Branka and Pere questioned their peers with attentiveness and curiosity, asking them to narrate their working processes and to tackle the often complex issues raised by their work.

On Friday the 28^th, the 17^th PSi (Perfromance Studies International) conference was oficially launched. Maaike Bleeker, one of the conference directors, announced a comprehensive program for next year. She related the story of Giulio Camillo, a 16^th century philosopher, that intended to create a Memory Theatre that could contain all the memories of mankind. Contemporary commentators often see a link between this dream and the promises of the internet as a memory machine. The conference, that will bear the title Camillo 2.0, will revolve around the concepts of memory, technology and experience. These will be explored through performances, lectures, and shifts (“hybrid program components introduced by participants or initiated by the organizers which pave the way to unconventional types of presentations”). The launch of the conference was fittingly accompanied by a a talk from Frederik LeRoy on the political implications of “reenacment” as a way to keep history alive and by a presentation of Woonmachine, and installation/performance by Belgian arquitect Laurent Liefhooge that will be part of next year's prorgram. The PSi conference will take place from the 25^th until the 29^th of May 2011 during the next edition of Festival a/d Werf.

Eclips: thought-provoking moments within an industrial warehouse

Theater collective The Glasshouse presents Eclips, directed by Kees Roorda. The work is built upon simple theatrical devices that generate profound consequences. The performance takes place in an almost empty, enormous storage room at the Jaarbeurs. The performers guide us through different areas of this space as the story, which guides the piece, unfolds. With the usage of a few props, simple narrative techniques, almost no lights, and the elegant music of three saxophones, they manage to bring about a unique environment. Within the clean openness of this industrial space, they generate moments of intimacy and immense beauty. Through a few stories and the interactions among characters, the performers engage people's imagination and effectively drive the audience into a state of philosophical reflection. Eclips will continue playing at Festival a/d Werf from the 25th until the 28th of May.

CAMPO: Five People, artistic collaboration at its best

Ideas of exchange and collaboration have become increasingly important for our contemporary culture. This is something beyond the obvious: you don't have to go far to see how these concepts have found their way into every imaginable aspect of everyday life. From business to education, going through sports to high art, people are collaborating with each other at unprecedented rates. Furthermore, these exchanges are happening between people of different backgrounds: cultural, educational and professional. The integration of ideas from diverging origins have come to dominate creativity and productivity and are redefining the ways we think and experience the world around us. Again, this is so obvious it is almost a cliché, and it is almost impossible to repeat these things in a way which is fresh and original. The performance Five People, by CAMPO is a rare opportunity for a playful questioning of what it means to collaborate with other people, with a different training and a different view of the world. Five artists will share a space, in a collaboration that will grow from a solo to a culminating moment where all five artists will be on stage. This performance can be seen at Festival a/d Werf from May 24 to 26 2010.

Rosa ensemble's mixture of stand-up comedy and music

Rosa Ensemble likes to challenge its audiences. After the premiere, the director told me that they always play with the expectations of the public, in order to offer something unique and unexpected. When they are invited to play in a pop venue, they would always open with a piece of classical music. And, likewise, if they are to play in a classical setting, they would not hesitate to include pop songs in their repertoire. It is in fact this irreverence that has made them thrive and given them a place within the Dutch musical theatre landscape. This time, they have collaborated with stand-up comedian Jan Jaap van der Wal to create a show that combines the distinctive music of the ensemble with the sharp-tongued wittiness of the comedian, built upon the story Simon Vestdijk's famous novel De kellner en de levenden (The waiter and the living). Every night a slightly different show is offered, since all of the performers are ready to adapt themselves to the audience, and to the unexpected developments of topical issues. Both the music and the words are flexible, in the tradition both of stand-up comedy and of Rosa Ensemble, a group fascinated by the tension between improvisation and composition. This show offers a fresh perspective, where experimental music and stand up comedy come into play. For those interested, this piece will still play today and tomorrow at Festival a/d Werf (be aware of the fact that this performance is in Dutch)

The premiere of "We Hope You (or why there are no butterflies in winter)"

When writing about the performances of Festival a/d Werf, a dilemma I often face refers to how much I should reveal about them. If I write too much, I might unintentionally blow the surprises they have in store for the audience. But then I think that if people knew what awaited them, they would certainly not miss a chance to see the performances. This is the case for João Evangelista’s We hope you (or why there are no butterflies in winter), a work that premiered yesterday evening at Huis a/d Werf. If you don’t want the surprise to be ruined for you, then take this sentence as a spoiler alert and don’t read beyond this point.

At some point during the performance, the audience will be invited to follow the performers, out of the theatre and into the streets that surround Huis a/d Werf. The performers will act as a sort of tour guides, describing the strangeness of a series of places that circumscribe the Huis. Working here, I usually cycle back to my house through the streets that João and Yen Yi-Tzu’ walk included and I must say that most of the places that they took me through had never grasped my attention. I had never realized the unusual, absurd or downright unbelievable character of the objects, street corners and abrupt public spaces that I was invited to look at in different light. Even if this piece can be described as a guided tour to some extent, the way in which the performers speak does not reproduce the style of your typical city-tour guide. It adopts a unique language, both naïve and abstract, that describes the urban environment in ways that challenge preconceptions and invite the audience to bring their own imagination into play. We could say, in a more technical way, that the performance allows the audience members to experience the mechanisms of hope. This is, at least, the way in which João likes to describe his intentions. And I think that with the usage of precise and ingenious theatrical devices, he fully succeeds in his goals. This performance is both uncomplicated and profound and it manages to deliver an experience that is aesthetically pleasing and thought-provoking at the same time. True to their own artistic quest, the performers triumphantly stay away from the superficiality of entertainment and the dryness of over-the-top intellectual art, while creating a deep and enjoyable experience for the people that venture with them into the streets. Art theorists often celebrate the capacity of art to trigger changes in the perception of the audience. And this inspiring work, in my opinion, clearly accomplishes this goal in a subtle and powerful way.

Adem: theatre as a journey

Some days ago, I had the opportunity to see a run-through of Roos van Geffen's Adem. I had already seen a few rehearsals and spoken to Roos on numerous occasions about her work. It was fascinating to see the result and to think back on the process I witnessed over the past months. Of course, some things might have changed during the past few days, after I saw that run-through. The process of fine-tuning a theatre piece is endless, specially for some one with as much attention to detail as Roos. The way I experienced it, however, felt pretty complete already. I was thrilled to discover how the different fragments I had seen earlier found their way into a compelling structure. The piece itself feels like a journey. Tempted as I am to describe it more in detail, I will only speak about in general terms because I don't want to ruin the surprise of the spectators. But what I want to share here is that the piece allows the audience to undergo an experience of transformation. I felt different, from the moment I stepped into the room to the moment I left. Something undeniably changed inside of me, something was stirred up and relocated. The piece, through simple and effective mechanisms, with subtle and powerful movements on behalf of the actors and the set design, creates the possibility for this change. At the beginning, I felt distanced both from the performers and the space. I also felt them separated from each other. But as time progressed, intimacy slowly crawled its way into the performance, resulting in a feeling of extreme closeness and connection. The piece premiers May 20^th and it will run until the 29^th (daily except on the 25th), for anyone interested in experiencing the transformation and the journey that this piece affords the viewers.

A REHEARSAL OF MIEK UITTENHOUT

Last week I had the opportunity to watch a run-through of Miek Uitenhout's performance Lollipop, which will be part of Festival a/d Werf 2010. In the performance, a woman is trapped inside of a bell jar, who the audiences watches blatantly as she engages in an inner battle. When talking about her work, Miek tells me that it all started with a fascination she had for Marie Antoinette. She was captivated by the contrast between the glamour of her life and the way in which she actually lived and eventually died. She then realized there were some points of comparison between her and Britney Spears. Even though the second one was born several hundred years later and is still alive, they remain, in Miek's mind, similar kinds of women. Both share a preoccupation for a public eye eager to follow their every move. Furthermore, both of them are tumultuous women in contact with extreme feelings. This is how she came up with the idea of the bell jar: “I think that when you are in contact with that extreme feeling, then you might be a bit closed towards the outside world, and that is the feeling that you are living in a bubble or in a bell jar”. What makes this image even more effective is the fact that it symbolizes concealment as much as exposure. The woman inside the jar is locked up inside her own world, but she is also on display, showcased in a transparent structure that doesn't allow her to hide anything from an audience that surrounds her. The glass is a perfect metaphor because it both distances and reveals the woman: it is a space of loneliness and entrapment in the midst of the public eye. Miek says, however, that this play is not only about Marie Antoinette or Britney Spears, but it is about every woman, and even about every person. When I ask her how she would like the audience to react to her work, she says she would like them to actually feel that they are not so different from these women, the extreme feeling that they experience(d) is actually “a bit closer to us than we think. You just need an open mind to the feeling. It is actually very close.”

Miek originally studied Graphic Design and Theatre Design. This visual background clearly shines through in her way of working and her conception of theatre. For this piece she first developed a sort of magazine, a personal, visual map of the issues she wanted to tackle in the piece: a collection of intimate thoughts expressed in the forms of images. Very early on she had the image of the bell-jar in her mind. As she pursued her research, she was also drawn toward the life and work of Sylvia Plath. To her surprise, she found the last work of Plath is a semi-autobiographical novel called The Bell Jar, which describes a woman who feels like she is living inside of such an object. For Miek this is not a coincidence, but rather a confirmation of the power and universality of the image that she is working with. Once she had an initial set of images from where to move forward, the next step was finding an actress who could impersonate Lollipop, the woman who would be trapped/exposed inside of the bell jar. “I had to find a strong but also beautiful actress, and also one that could be the 'ideal woman', or at least the ideal woman that we sketch in the fashion world”. For this, she found Lotte Verbeek: “I saw her in Nothing Personal, where she was a strong woman that wore no make up and was dressed in boots. And then I saw an interview with her where she was wearing make up and had a little dress on. And I thought that she had that contrast already in her. That is what I am looking for. The ideal image but also something behind the beautiful face.” Miek developed the initial set of ideas through improvisations with Lotte. The beginning and the end have remained almost unchanged but everything else was developed in communication with Lotte: “there is a lot of her in the piece”. During the first part of the working process, they developed a lot of material, and then Miek started to discard most of these excessive amount of material, letting go of most parts and keeping just the essential ones: “I wanted to have too much, I wanted to kill a lot of darlings”. She didn't want to articulate her material into a story or a conventional piece, but rather offer something that she describes “like a sort of roller-coaster: you are looking at it and you get captured”.

The fact that Lotte is a public figure, a well-known film actress, also helps bring about the theme of this play. It deals with women who are both fake and authentic in the public eye, being true to themselves but also doing this in front of an audience. However, as Miek pointed out repeatedly as she talked to me, this is not as far removed as we might think. Extreme feelings, an awareness of being enclosed and exposed, a longing for wanting to be true to yourself while at the same time being watched by others... those are all things that everyone -Miek says- can relate to.

INTERVIEW WITH GISELLE VEGTER

Giselle Vegter is a theatre maker who makes performances about topical issues. During Festival a/d Werf she will show RUMOR, a play that will take place in a busy square, behind the central train station of Utrecht. Several performers will be portraying characters and interacting with each other in the middle of the square. They will be watched by a group of spectators from the lounge of a theatre, located in the second floor of a building that looks over the square. This piece premiered last year in Linz, Austria.

In this play you have two different sets of spectators, can you tell me a bit more about how that works?

There is the real audience, who are somehow treated like voyeurs. They are hidden, standing in a place above in a building, so you can't see them from the street. And there are also people looking at this from the street. And the ideal situation would be that they don't know that there is theatre going on, that it doesn't draw too much attention. Although sometimes it will because there are some conflicts among the characters and because it is impossible to play something in the street that is fully natural. Every time an actor starts a dialogue in the streets there is somehow another tension. But that is also what is interesting about it. It is also good if people can realize that there is something different going on. Probably they won't really know what it is and most of them will just walk on. And these people passing by are also being looked at, of course. They are unintentionally walking into a theatre play.

How did people react to this in Austria? Did people believe into the reality of the play?

Partly, with some roles yes but less with others. For example, everybody thought that the homeless man was real but this happened less with the youngsters. You could see that they were acting and that what they were doing was not really true. So that is why I will try to make it more subtle this time, more natural although it will still be theatrical.

How did you develop the idea for this play?

Well, I like to look at people on the street and I think everybody does. I started imagining how it would be if we could all know what is going on inside the heads of the strangers around us, or what their stories are. If you go to the central train station, there are so many individual longings and stories and if you look at the faces you see already a lot, but sometimes I like to fantasize more about them. And then I started thinking what would happen if you could turn these individual longings into a theatre piece and put it in the middle of reality and then allow people to look at this for a while. And I think that I'm also questioning the way theatre is positioning itself against real life. Often when I see a theatre piece, I think it has nothing to do with real life. So I think we should make theatre -or, at least, I would like to make theatre- that has a closer connection with the reality that we are living in. I am looking for ways to translate this, to find and tell stories that have a strong connection with our world.

What role should theatre play in society?

It should have a critical role. We should reflect and go further, bringing in new thoughts about the world that we're living in and about ourselves. What I like about theatre, and about art in general, that it is somehow outside of the system and we have great freedom there. And I would like to use this freedom in a conscious way.

Would you say that your work is political?

If you think of political work as a way of making things clear or raising awareness then I would say yes although I would rather call it societal. Once, for example, I made a performance for children about transience (vergankelijkheid). And it is not a political story but it is about how we deal with people who suffer from memory problems, and that makes it relevant to our society.

Your piece seems to also tackle issues about surveillance and exposure, and about a distinction between the private and the public that is becoming increasingly blurry.

Absolutely. We are being watched and exposed continuously, and we are also becoming uneasy about this. We are becoming increasingly afraid of being exposed. I think we are being disturbed by this and we don't always know how to deal with it. An example of this is mobile phones, that people are using to speak their private lives out in public. And they are featured extensively in the performance.

INTERVIEW WITH FANNI FUTTERKNECHT

Fanni Futterknecht works as a performer and visual artist in Vienna, Paris and Amsterdam. She studied visual art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna, followed by a Masters study at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. Her previous focus of interest was video installations, but she currently develops performances that are constructed for traditional theatre contexts. In 2006 she joined the program Essai at the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine in Angers, a program aimed at young artists from different disciplines, that fosters the exploration of new dance and performance strategies. In Spring 2008 she received a grant for a three months residency in Rome where she pursued her choreographic and her visual work. After her stay in Rome she lived for half a year as artist in residence at La Cite International des Arts in Paris where she developed her last solo performance Excerpts of confusion. This performance had its premiere at Imagetanz Festival 09 in brut Vienna. At the moment she is working on a new performance: Where life has no value, paradise sometimes has its price which was presented at WUK Vienna and will be shown at Festival a/d Werf.

In which way does your work as a visual arts influence your work?

I wouldn't consider myself a visual artist but rather simply somebody who is creating work inspired by a visual art context. My background as a visual artist is still very present, I think in a very 'image-based' way. When I make performances I think a lot about the images I want to create. Not only the images that I want to produce as such, that you can actually see, but also the ones I want to evoke in the spectator. I feel concerned about the physicality of the image, of how to represent them within a performative situation. There is also the aspect of time that became very relevant for my work now. Before, I was working with video, which is a different way of using time.

So this aspect is something I am really curious about, how do we read a performance in relation to a film. For example, the difference between time in video and time in a live event, in a performance, where you cannot hide anything. How could you create a performance with a time feeling that is rather related to film? I try to create the equivalent of zooms, or close ups in a performance. I always start with an idea of an image and then I try to develop a certain physicality or action that would allow me to approach this image.

Speaking of aesthetics, I have the impression that you are working with very aesthetic, compared with your previous work.

Yes it might look different, but the strategy of aesthetic is maybe the same. Now this piece deals with artificiality and superficiality. It is a plastic paradise, with naïve shapes and cartoon figures. It is full of strong colours put together in an obvious relation. One of the performance works that I did before was inspired by a more “painterly” way of creating an image, like a baroque painting.

It was composed in a way that could remind you of such a style. But this new piece is about artificiality and the texture of artificiality; it is also about naiveté, and so there is a need to work with simple shapes and simple obvious actions.

Can you tell me a bit more about your projects for the future?

I don't perceive my work as projects. For me it is one big research that comes out through different works or objects but in the end I actually feel I am always busy with the same thing. But I can say that I would like to make another solo work which goes further into this aspect of naiveté and innocence and therefore would also like to collaborate with children for certain scenes.

Can you name this search?

That would actually be a contradictory thing to do. I am in fact working exactly against this idea of naming things or framing them or putting them down or being concrete about things. But of course, in a way, I still do it a lot. But I do it in order to leave these frames or definitions or even theories behind. I do not want to base my work on theory, even though theory inspires me a lot. And I also don't want to speak about the concrete or well-defined. My work is rather about the open, the 'un-concrete', the undefined. I have a very big drive to go into things that we but also the dreams that we dream when we are awake. What is this 'un-physical' mental or even spiritual cannot grasp or that are not really reachable. I am curious to find out about different realities. For instance, the reality of dreams. Not only the dreams we have at night that happen in the unconscious, reality and how does it seduce us? This has to do with my very personal relation to life.

Interview with João Evangelista

“It is all about being stupid so that the audience can be intelligent”

João Evangelista (Portugal/The Netherlands) majored in Artificial Intelligence and Logic Systems Theory, before completing the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam (where he studied choreography, performance art and directing). He makes live performances, theatre, dance and everything that falls in between. When seen his work, the public is never static, but is always invited to participate in one way or another. For Festival a/d Werf 2010, he will present We hope you (or why there are no butterflies in winter). He started working on this piece last year, as an artist in residence at Huis a/d Werf, after his last work ‘The End Must Go On (or how to survive midnight without becoming a pumpkin in 10 easy steps)’, a 6 hours durational performance presented at Pact-Zollverein, Essen (DE).

At which stage of your creative process are you at the moment?

When the residency was taking place, we were finding the work by doing it. Now the work is done, the 'machine' is ready. What I am currently doing is dismembering the machine into parts, and I'm looking at how the different parts make the motive behind of the work emerge.

Through this performance, I want people to experience the three basic mechanisms of hope, which are derived from the philosophy of Ernst Bloch: awareness of the not yet, of what is to come; daydreaming, which is imagining beyond what is already there; and a perception shift where both things come together. So I am focusing to understand which part of the performance, of the 'machine', can better trigger each of these mechanisms and how it actually does that.

How do you test these things?

For the moment, it is just me, the philosopher Elisabeth Boender, and the and the artist I invited for the collaborative process Yen Yi-Tzu, looking at documentation of the work, mapping it and understanding it from the outside. Later on, I'll rehearse it and have open showings to see how it actually works.

'Hope' appears to me to be something very subjective, how can you trigger it as a collective experience in the audience?

I just want people to experience the three basic mechanisms that hope requires. Instead of aiming at big words or the big concepts, such as Hope, I aim at deconstructing it into smaller mechanisms as I told you about. If the audience, through these three mechanisms, can experience hope, that would be great. But I couldn't do the whole work for the audience. I can trigger things, but that's about it. How they take it is up to them.

You mentioned Bloch before. The work which you are doing is partially inspired in a philosophical investigation, but I understand that you don't want to make it an obscure and intellectual piece. How do you aim to achieve this?

By making it very naive. My own philosophical reflections should stay in the studio, or presented as an end publication, something very usual in the field of fine arts, but not theater. There is a simplification of the complexities. I want to understand what kind of language operates in which way. When we look for banal and absurd locations, places that can trigger day dreaming, for example. It is all about being stupid so that the audience can be intelligent. We research all these theories but we replace them with things that are very simple, almost on the edge of being silly and naïve, that belong to the everyday life, but reflect the seriousness of the subject I approach.

Guillaume Marie talks about his work Nancy

“The more you see it's fake, the more you believe into it, and the more disturbing it gets”

Guillaume Marie is a young French Choreographer who was born in Caen in 1980 and currently lives in Paris. He has worked with people such as Jan Fabre and the object theatre director Gisèle Vienne. He created his first performance Cracking your smile in 2005. From then on he has created work together with Jonathan Capdevielle and Maria Stamenkovic-Herranz and directed short movies. For Festival a/d Werf 2010 he will show a very particular interpretation of the death (and life) of Nancy Spungen, the wife and former groupie of Sid Vicious from Sex Pistols.

How did you become so interested in Nancy's death?

I started working two years ago with Maria Stamenkovic-Herranz, an artist from Spain who is now based in New York. The first event that we worked on was about the death of Joan Vollmer, William Burrough's wife. I was fascinated by that very famous event and by the way in which people were connected to it through their own imaginations. Through their own subjectivity, they rebuilt or reconstructed it. So, from this point onwards I decided to make a cycle of pieces with this idea in mind. The first one was Trigger, about Vollmer, the second one is Nancy and the third one is going to be called AsfixiA and it is going to be created in 2011.

With the first piece, we didn't have any images or any police report about the death so most of the material came from Burrough's books and other writers from the Beat Generation. Also it wasn't clear if her death was an accident or a murder. With Nancy I was interested in an event that happened a bit later in time, with the same amount of mysteries around it, so that we could have some more images and documents available. And the third one should be about an overmediatised event. But all of them are about how our own fantasies and our own subjectivity connects us to those events, and furthermore to what surrend us. What is important for me is to start from this reality point and to discover possible metaphors and symbols within it, so that the result becomes a visual piece, not a narrative work. I am not interested in telling Nancy's story. We dis-articulated the story completely so that we could rebuild it as a nightmarish journey. And in my opinion, this way we can get closer to the truth of what actually happened than if we were using details and anecdotes.

How would you like people to experience this?

At the point where we are now, what we created is very ambiguous and ritualistic. And I like that very much. The performer Suet Wan Tsang is representing Nancy's journey, and is also performing with Rebecca Flores, a make up artist . I was very interested in how this metaphoric journey can be interrupted by a more real action which is the application of makeup and special effects. So we are being hypnotized by what is happening to the performer, and then this is broken by a kind of making of, as if you were present at the shooting of a movie. And, at the same time, with Rebecca's work you always question what you are seeing. Sometimes it looks very fake and sometimes it looks very real. I don't think it is a very comfortable piece to watch to be honest, it is very challenging, because I ask a lot of things from the audience. I think it provokes a lot of questions about what you are watching and how to process it.

So you were not looking for a sort of alienation or Verfremdungseffekt with the appearances of the makeup artist?

This is funny because that it is how I thought it would be. But now that the piece is almost finished I am seeing the opposite, it actually creates a lot of tension. It is very interesting to see how the elements are articulating with each other. I am still trying to understand what is going on there. It's weird because the more you see it is fake, the more you believe into it, and the more disturbing it gets. It is very hypnotic to watch. A friend came to see it and said something interesting. She said the piece starts with death and then moves on to life, but somehow life seems even more fucked up than death. So all these distortions can be quite confusing as an audience member.

Tell me more about your process. How did you work so that you could accommodate this unexpected effects into the piece?

First of all I did a lot of research and presented it to the others. It is very important for me that people digest all this information because my work is about how you transform things with your own subjectivity, how you make it your own. We also prepared several things in advance with Rebecca, the makeup artist, and ended up having a collection of effects we could use. We did a lot of pre-production work, so once we arrived in the studio a lot of elements were already there: the stage design, the visual imagery for the projections, the music and the makeup. We then started to play with the elements and quite soon we began 'writing' the piece, in a way which was very similar to writing a movie script. We knew that Suet-Wan would go through certain states and pictorial moments but we spent a lot of time developing the transitions between those moments and the layers that could actually turn her into a character. We worked hard on building the psychology behind the character.

I find the mention of psychology interesting. Often people who don't want to deliver a story in a traditional way also shy away from any psychological aspect.

Well, I'm quite busy with Lacan at the moment, and this is what I understand by 'psychological'. I am trying to bring the three main elements of Lacanian psychology into the piece which are the real, the other and the symbolic. Because those three elements are articulated with each other and present though different forms or materials in the structure, I can say that psychology is all over the piece.

When you talk about this project, you also refer to the way in which faith has shifted in western societies from the religious sphere to that of fandom within pop culture.

When I started to work on Nancy, I suddenly found a connection between her and Santa Teresa de Ávila. And from this point we started to look at all the similarities and differences. Nancy was a groupie, searching for some kind of fame or adoration while believing in the punk utopia, and that state of belief is very close to a religious belief which creates an opposition that I find very interresting to explore. So from this point on, you can start using religious words to describe a rock 'n' roll story.

A rehearsal with James Beckett

Last week I had the opportunity to sneak into a couple of rehearsals of Zakłady na Życie (Plant-Life), the performance that James Beckett is preparing for the Festival a/d Werf 2010. In this work in progress, he is looking for something subtle that escapes clear-cut definitions. Neither fully a performance but also not a work of visual art. Probably the realm where this work could be more accurately placed is that of music. Throughout the rehearsal, James often refers to the performers as musicians. This does not mean that they actually play music, at least not by standard accounts of what music is. But they understand movements and words in a way which is akin to that of musicians. Their craft is not that of emotions and storytelling, and not even that of actions and sounds. Their work is inserted in the universe of silences and notes, of rhythms, repetition and sequences that engage with the time and space of the performance with the elegance of a minimalist opera. It is not by accident that he often refers to the work of Robert Ashley, a major composer and creator or multidisciplinary projects, that extended the boundaries of musical exploration in radical ways. His work Automatic Writing (1979), for example, integrated words that were triggered by his mild Tourett's Syndrome. He justifies this exploration in a fascinating way: “I wondered, naturally, because the syndrome has to do with sound-making and because the manifestation of the syndrome seemed so much like a primitive form of composing-an urgency connected to the sound-making and the unavoidable feeling that I was trying to 'get something right'-whether the syndrome was connected in some way to my obvious tendencies as a composer.” (click here for the complete article)

The forms explored by Ashley -which often include only a restricted number of elements that are inserted into structures where repetition is very important- certainly provide some inspiration for James. On a different level, however, his usage of found objects is probably more closely related to world of contemporary visual arts or to the theatrical work of directors such as Tadeusz Kantor (as I have pointed out in a previous post.) From a collection of unusual relics found in abandoned Polish factories, he has devised a space that offers a glimpse into the life inside those factories. It is not a collection of stories or a historical explanation of what happened there, but rather an artistic interpretation, carefully crafted by the combination of concrete objects and rhythmic sequences of voices and movements, that are both compelling and mysterious.

A second rehearsal with Roos van Geffen.

Today I had the opportunity to see another rehearsal with Roos. Unlike last time, today she was working with all five performers at once (on the previous occasion she was working with only one of them). They were all simultaneously repeating a carefully choreographed set of motions, and yet they looked so different to one another. They would reproduce the same movement -for example, nodding at a particular speed and with a certain rhythm- with astonishing precision and attention to detail. And yet their movements would come across as being radically diverse from those of the other performers. A subtle expression which would strike me as contempt in one of the faces, would appear to be joyful detachment or plain resignation when carried out by the other performers.

The interesting thing is that these emotions are completely in the mind of the spectator (in this case, in my mind). The performers are actually forbidden to try to represent or act out any emotion. Rather, they give themselves completely to the task of following a very precise set of actions, rigorously woven together. When they accomplish this scheme with full concentration, then the audience members can engage with them in a playful and active usage of their imagination, bringing along their own set of associations. Roos describes her objective as “triggering deeper layers of memory” in the minds of the spectators. During the rehearsal I couldn't help thinking about the beautiful book by Yoshi Oida, An actor adrift. There, he often describes how some of the most striking performances he ever witnessed were always accomplished by actors whose mind was “empty”. Empty, at least, of emotions. He explains how, when a complete devotion to a physical task is accomplished by a performer on stage, a state of perfect blankness is achieved, a void which can be compared to a hollow container, which the spectators -in a way which is often unconscious- fill in with their own minds, with imagery from their personal memories.

A rehearsal with Roos van Geffen

A week ago I had the opportunity to talk to Roos van Geffen about her work in progress, Adem (breath). She has been rehearsing for a couple of weeks at the Huis a/d Werf and she just made a short video with one of the actresses she is working with, in order to keep track of her research process. In it, the actress nods while looking into the camera. Subtle changes make the movement appear completely different. At first, it is a perfectly neutral nod, without any hint of anything else. Then she nods with her head up high, her eyes slightly down, but still looking straight into the camera. Later on, she lowers her head completely, still nodding, with her chin almost touching her chest. Finally, her nodding becomes violent, plunging her head into a furious dance. But the frenzy suddenly gives way and all movement stops. I feel tempted to describe the feelings that this movements might induce in the spectators: 'when her head is lifted she looks at us with contempt, when her head is lowered, she looks gloomy', that kind of things. But that is not completely accurate. Describing the movements in such a way is not being true to what actually goes on in the film. And as Roos tells me, the video itself is a poor substitute for the live version of those actions. That is why I ask her if I can see one of her rehearsals, a privilege she happily grants me. So the next day I join her and her team. It is fascinating to see Roos at work with the actors. She looks at them with such intensity, pursuing with them the discovery of actions that can have an peculiar resonance. She engages in this research process with patience and curiosity, looking for something very unique. But what is it that she is looking for? When I ask her, she says that in her performances she is always trying to create a moment of silence, to prepare the members of the audience to enjoy a moment of untroubled calmness. A prime example of this is We, one of her former theater works. There, two spectators were lead to a moment where they could look at each other for three minutes. In most of her previous experiential projects, the spectators had very individual experiences. This time, her work Adem, will maintain all this intimacy, while moving into a more conventional theater stage. This work will premiere at the Festival a/d Werf 2010.

P.S. After seeing the rehearsal, I have to agree that the video cannot capture the whole complexity of what is happening on stage... so I will not embed the video it here. Anyways, I hope these words have triggered the imagination of the readers of this blog, and their curiosity to come to the festival and check out the work of Roos. I leave you, however, with a short interview with her.

VIEWMASTER: The series

“The thing is in a place, but perception in nowhere.”

Merleau-Ponty

On Friday the 26th of February, Finnish artist Inari Salmivaara presented the performance that marked the end of her research period with Viewmaster. After three weeks of intense work with two performers, her work premiered with two sold-out events at the Huis a/d Werf. The result was an elegant exploration of the way in which we perceive the world around us. It had a contemplative rhythm that induced people into sharing the artist's questions about perception and reality. It was a beautiful and sober performance that was greatly appreciated, at least from what I could gather in the after-talks. Furthermore, the original creators of Viewmaster (Heike Langsdorf, Ula Sickle and Laurent Liefooghe ) were excited about the results. This is the first stone in the road of Viewmaster:The Series, a collaborative approach where different artists will be invited to come and work with the machine that developed last year, after an 19^th century optical effect often referred to as the Pepper's ghost effect.

The following video show an excerpt of the research process:

Alain Platel: the power of exceptional performances

One reason to go to the theatre is having a desire to be confronted with an exceptional experience. Theatre scholar Adrian Keer describes this experience perfectly: “to be ‘moved’ by a piece, to be shocked, stimulated, exhilarated, amused or horrified is, in effect to have a ‘gut reaction’ to it: a visceral as well as intellectual experience ‘that strikes us first in the belly then runs through our whole body’(1)”.

This depth of experience, this combination of a visceral and intellectual shock is not commonly found. As an example of a performance where he found this qualities, Keer mentions Alain Platel’s work Bernadetje, a performance he describes as “an event of extraordinary insight and intesnsity (2)”.

Platel has become a master in crafting these extraordinary experiences. Shocking, beautiful, intense - his numerous performances have accomplished a huge degree of public and critical acclaim through the years. His most recent work Out of Context, draws inspiration from his earlier life as a movement therapist. The performance was developed from an investigation into limited movements that grew into a rich choreography of bizarre beauty. This performance will be shown in Utrecht within the Festival a/d Werf. Below you can see a couple of interviews with Platel about this work. The interviews are in Dutch but the images speak for themselves.

NOTES:
1. Alan Keer, “Desire amongst the dodgems, Alain Platel ad the scene of seduction” in J.Kelleher and N. Ridout, eds., Contemporary Theatres in Europe, Routledge, London and New York:Routledge, 2006, pp.106-119, (p.106)
2. Ibid, p. 107 This performance was also shown in one of the earlier editions of the Festival a/d Werf.

The Viewmaster: performance & workshop

“You know it's a trick, you can see how the trick is made. But you still want to see it”. There could not be a better description for what happens with the Viewmaster, which was performed at Huis a/d Werf last Tuesday the 2nd of February. This is a performance that makes use of the Pepper Ghost effect, an optical illusion discovered in the 19th Century. Through this, people and objects give the impression of appearing and disappearing, fading in an out of sight and walking around in a transparent ghost-like consistency. Heike Langsdorf, Ula Sickle and Laurent Liefooghe worked with this technique and developed several ways of using the Viewmater over a long research period. They ended up having “a catalog of effects” that they could use. For the performance, they decided to concentrate on only a few of the possibilities discovered for the sake of unity. However, the latent possibilities of this wonderful object still linger around and the creators felt the need to do something about them. In order to further explore the potential of the Viewmaster, they have decided to allow it to grow into a new project called The series. For this, several artists from different disciplines will be invited to explore the unused potential of the Viewmaster. The first of such artists is Inari Salmivaara, who will work at the Huis a/d Werf as a guest explorer of the Viewmaster. Her completed performance will premiere on the 26th of February. Below you can see some pictures of the workshop in which the functioning of the Viewmaster was explained, and the first imaginative exercises of Inari Salmivaara, where she has started to investigate the combination of the Viewmaster with video projection.

Talking to James and thinking about the polish theater master

As I was interviewing James Beckett a while ago, I couldn’t stop thinking about Tadeusz Kantor (1915-1990). So many things struck me as similar. Kantor, one of the greatest theatre directors of the 20th century, was originally a visual artist. And one could clearly see traces of his obsessions as a visual artist in the way in which he organized the elements on the stage (actors and objects alike). One of this obsessions was looking for objects with a particular aura, that he beautifully described as “being halfway between the trashcan and eternity”. And this phrase fits the work of James Becket like a glove. The South African artist (Becket that is), was also originally trained in the field of the visual arts, and he has been doing research on industrial heritage in Poland for the past few months. This research is, as he himself describes it, a very “concrete” approach to the industrial heritage of this country. He was looking for objects with a sensitivity that Kantor would have approved of. James told me with enthusiasm how he found an electric transistor that had a very primitive quality to it, “It looked like a bone”, he said. James’s choice of country is, lastly, the final connection to Kantor, who was born in Wielopole (a city that makes part of present day Poland) and who had a conflicting and creative relationship to Poland and it’s history.

Click here to watch the interview: