Stifters Dinge photo Dimitri Lauwers |
Heiner Goebbels’ Stifters Dinge opens the festival with a majestically breathtaking theatre installation that pays homage to nature through musical, visual, sculptural, elemental composition. Two technical assistants manoeuvre tubes and powder before leaving us alone with this pulsing, breathing creation: an automaton that at moments seems to move into its own quasi-organic rhythm. It faces us, three enormous shallow rectangular pools filled with water from luminous tanks. Bordered by rows of speakers, it emits both strange and familiar languages, as pipes clunk and lights cross-fade from murky greens through dusky sepia to crisp blues, and occasionally flash blinding white. The heart of this machine lies beyond the pools, sometimes obscured by screens that rise and fall reflecting ripples, picturing a forest. As its shapes are revealed, we can make out sheets of metal, bare branches and five grand pianos heavily rooted at unexpected angles and levels. Gutted, modified, hybridised, encased in scaffold skeletons, the exposed innards of these instruments are electronic circuits forming new nuclei to control its tendon strings.
Each element of this musical box is visible: sheet-metal flexed for bass and piano keys depressed to sound melancholy chords. This industrial landscape reconstructs rain, mist, a sunset inside its metal confines. A lone piano plays Bach as showers fall into the pools through icy blue light. Later, the whole sculpture creeps towards us as another piano hurls jagged notes that become increasingly frantic, chromatic scales running out of control to a filmic climax until it halts, towering threateningly above us just metres away. But this is not the danger of raw nature. Goebbels and his team exercise precise control over this shifting landscape, ironically underlining human inadequacy in any attempt to 'save nature' by making it our 'project': a tendency the festival program points up as symptomatic of our heightened sense of ecological responsibility.
End photo Catherine Antoine |
A terrifying growling, glaring beast lurches across; a car engine suspended in the air. Loudspeakers on wheels pass by, amplifying shrill, chilling operatic voices. A solitary flame traces a line along the ground. These figures, trapped in some sort of cyclical post-Beckett dystopia, will not be offered any respite as they traverse this world, “relics of a past that was still intact a few days ago. ” The images bore into us like a stuck record, stylus forever locked in the same groove, and feed our nightmares long after the show has finished.
The audience for Regarding, a collaboration between Brussels-based performer Isabelle Dumont, filmmaker Annik Leroy and writer Virginie Thirion, are initially left to find their own way around Meinhof, Leroy’s three audiovisual installations based on the infamous leader of the Rote Armee Fraktion (a German left-wing post-1968 terrorist group) who was found dead in her prison cell. The cavernous space presents excerpts from her correspondence and slow, static films depicting images of isolation and incarceration.
Having circuited the screens, we gather on bare benches in another dark corner to watch Regarding. This three tiered performance slowly unfolds, interrogating our relationship with war photographs and deconstructing the way we view violent images. In further claustrophobic films from Leroy the camera looks down narrow corridors and hovers slowly over a war photograph. We can hear a female voice speaking Thirion’s text, which intricately describes a photograph of an execution, recapturing the viewer’s every thought as she envisages the moments leading up to the deaths depicted. In a rectangle at our feet Dumont lines up pots and tools, then gradually begins to apply pastes, liquids, chalk, earth to her body with surgical precision, transforming herself into a battered corpse lying before us.
Inspired by Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) this multilayered experience attempts to act as a remedy to a media-exacerbated, trivialised, disposable attitude to images of suffering. Like Goebbels’ Stifters Dinge and Verdonck’s End, this is a performance of duration and repetition, but rather than the engaged interactivity of the previous shows, this work demands a distanced contemplation of the processes we undertake while experiencing reality and representation.
It is Written There photo Lux Vleminckx |
On page 21 there are raised white letters. Blackout, and the word is glowing: “STAR” appears on my lap, repeated tens of times throughout the dark auditorium. The relationships between word and image, static and time-based are examined with a playful energy, as charming, inventive ideas are presented to us page by page. Our books form a semantic barrier between us and the performers, interrupting our engagement with them, but also guiding us through a web of multiple interpretations: simplicity of physical composition and moments of stillness and silence leave room for an exercise in imagination. Despite the individual isolation of reading, the books bring the audience together as a community as we simultaneously turn pages and discover meanings. Could this distanced intellectual aesthetic provide some hope in the face of the destruction explored by the earlier performances? Perhaps contemplation and disengagement might allow an escape from a disturbing, cyclical future.
2008 Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels: Stifters Dinge, concept, music, direction Heiner Goebbels, scenography, light & video design Klaus Grünberg, music collaboration Hubert Machnik, sound design Willi Bopp; Théâtre National, May 9-13; End, concept, direction Kris Verdonck, dramaturgy Marianne Van Kerkhoven, video Anouk De Clercq, music Stefaan Quix, light design Luc Schaltin, Kaaitheater, May 9-13; Meinhof, concept, realisation, camera Annik Leroy, editing Julie Morel, sound Marie Vermeiren; Regarding, concept, realisation Isabelle Dumont, Annik Leroy, Virginie Thirion, La Raffinerie, May 23-31; It is written there, direction Zan Yamashita, light design Asako Miura, sound design Mitsunori Miyata, book design Emi Naya, Beursschouwburg, May 9-13
RealTime issue #86 Aug-Sept 2008 pg. 54
© Eleanor Hadley Kershaw; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]