A Rozentheater blog PREVIEW...
Translating performance and other things in Amsterdam
About the blog:
Rozentheater is enlisting a diverse bunch of bloggers to comment on what's happening in Amsterdam. The blog will include reviews, columns, reflections on artistic processes, impressions of ambience around town, and quotidian commentaries. I spent a few months contributing to their project with some English posts, many of which dealt with what I understood in absence of language (Nederlands)...
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26th March
Solid Ground Movement and Jongerentheater 020's Dissbalance
and ISH Lab's Late Night Studio
Dissbalance
During Dissbalance there were at least 6 things to hold your attention going on at any single moment. (I couldn’t help but wonder if this isn’t one version of what our theater generation requires.) This multi-focussed style allowed for a simple but remarkable scene to work in duration: At the beginning of the show there was a sequence of repetition where two girls harassed another girl with simple, limited acts of zipping and unzipping her hoodie, pulling up the legs of her trousers, and prettifying her hair. The girl would forcefully but somehow gently return these elements to their prior conditions and then it would start again.
There were weak links: too much “acting” from some of the dancers throughout; some scenarios during the middle of the piece playing out a little too long; and I’m not quite sure that the production was profoundly about “the quest for the ultimate balance in our world” as it claimed to be... But regardless, this was an amateur effort worthy of a wider audience than the supportive friends and family of the young performers who lent the crowd an enthusiastic energy.
Worth mentioning is the girl in the dress. I call her “the girl in the dress” because I’ve seen her on stage twice: the first time in Het feest van het grote geld as the girl in the red dress, and this time the girl in the white dress. Each time the dress was a solid, visually marking colour on stage, and the wearer was equally solid and impressive. It's not that she made the others look bad, but this young woman is performing on her own level. I look forward to seeing what she does next.
ISH Lab
This late night performance following Dissbalance was, it seemed to me, a warm-up for events to come, and a platform for young people and people who participate with ISH programmes to show their community what they’ve been up to. The best part, though punters didn’t pay it much formal attention, was the beat-boxing in the foyer before people went upstairs for the actual ISH show. The upstairs portion included a quick hip hop choreography and another on roller skates which was unremarkable but undeniably good fun.
A great crowd at Rozentheater on March 26th...
Rarely the same audience two shows in a row...
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21st March
Words
I’ve been to 9 performances over the past month and a half and in at least 4 of them one of the only words I understood was ‘MichaelJackson’. I’m sure that the dearly departed was not a key element of any of these shows but it is funny how we’ll tune into and remember what we know...my other most notable verbal observation being ‘Niet Normaal’ (thanks to the Niet Normaal project, I’ve got this vocabulary committed to memory and am now aware of how often ‘Dit is niet normaal’ is exclaimed emphatically between friends in the street). A week ago at Sanne Vogel’s 'Late Night Ideals' I expressed pride at understanding what was deemed false (‘verkeerd’), thanks to my ritual of drinking lattés (‘koffee verkeerd’-- literally false coffee).
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9th March
Late Avond Idealen (Late Night Ideals)
Audiences know that the significance of a performance is sometimes situated in the conversations it provokes, accidentally or not. After Late Avond Idealen., I sat with two excellent people, one born roughly a decade after me and the other a decade before me, and discussed what we had each understood about the piece and our impressions based on our three different national cultures and times in our lives--since the piece was very much about a particular generation, and life period. We talked too about the status of women and men from our perspectives, whether or not the shapes of the bodies on stage were relevant to the show, to us... In a way, we entered into a conversation about ‘the good life’ and what seemed possible for us and our communities now.
Words I understood:
Normaal, Straat, turbulentie, Micheal Jackson, Verkeerd, waar was Ik?
I thought the show lacked honesty in its criticism of contemporary human behaviour and I don’t think it holds to say that was the point. Was it hypocritical on purpose? My younger friend wanted to think so; the attitudes displayed in the performance rang truer for her, than they did for me--which makes sense given that her generation was the one portrayed-- but as she, like me, couldn’t understand Dutch, she couldn’t be sure--and that might have been a good thing for our conversation.
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19th February
Het feest van het grote GELD at Stadsschouwburg, 19th February 2010
Inspired by Toneelgroep Amsterdam's production of Goldoni’s Zomertrilogie, Toneelgroep Amsterdam JR’s Het feest van het grote GELD -- ‘The big MONEY party’ -- was performed by 30 students from 5 Amsterdam high schools. Full of adolescent energy, but with no resemblance to a ‘high school production’ the show was performed by slick but earnest teenagers: as while they played personas in the action, they also played themselves--or rather they embodied this time in their lives with heartfelt gutsy bravado. Their energy was infectious--even for a non Dutch speaker who had no clue what they were saying...
When I entered the space (like an exclusive modern bar set up in air-hanger), I sat in bleacher-like audience space, next to a boy dedicated to a video game on his ipod. He and his mother had an argument about it and the device was torn from him just as the (official) performers entered the scene. 10 minutes later, the boy’s body language had completely changed. He was leaning forward in his chair closely following the visual action; he was tapping his feet to the beats of the sound system...
In some ways, the energy of Het feest van het grote GELD reminded me of Ontroerend Goed’s Once and for all we’re going to tell you who we are so shut-up and listen (though unlike Once and for all..., Het feest... is not explicitly about being a teenager). It was not quite as tight a production, but without the predictable polish of a show that has been touring for years in the international circuit, Het feest van het grote GELD demonstrated greater teenage authenticity despite the fact that this show was about ‘grown-up‘ behaviour. I was reminded too of another unforgettable production, which also sent currents of energy through the audience’s collective body: SHUNT’s Money. Like Het feest... Money is also inspired by a period text (Zola’s L’Argent) about arbitrary and irresponsible relationships with money. But the more visceral reason I was reminded of SHUNT’s latest work was for aesthetic reasons: the constant surprises for all the senses in Het feest... and staying on the right side of the fine line between gimmicky and original.
I spoke with a few of the teens after the show and embarrassed myself by taking some guesses at what some of the Dutch meant...One of the charming young men assured me that I had understood the most important language of the show, which had been repeated several times in English. It was a monologue about how to get rich: “...first decide you want to be rich...imagine it every night...” and also a chant turned dance beats: “fame, glamour, money, success...” The show made consumerism and material fortune repulsive but also enticing, as somehow we wanted to be up there on stage, decked out, drinking champagne and conforming in dance with the mob. And isn’t that’s the truth about fame, glamour, money and success? Visibly grotesque or not, they dare us to reject the impulse?
Text and images by Erin Brubacher
Toneelgroep Amsterdam JR’s Het feest van het grote GELD
Referenced:
SHUNT’s Money
Ontroerend Goed’s Once and for all we’re going to tell you who we are so shut-up and listen
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11/13 February
Niet Normaal: two shows at Rozentheater
1. Theatergroep Ponies’ Normaal:
This production was my first in Dutch. Language or no language, to me, the message ‘re-evaluate your idea of normal’ was really clear--without being heavy handed. The actors, who played teenagers, behaved in a way that was at once imitative of teens and also self reflexive about not being in that moment themselves; the performance began in that ‘hi, this is a performance and we are actors’ way, which is of course not an original approach but fresh for the audience comprised of several groups of high school students for this afternoon performance. The aesthetic was simple but innovative. I kept catching myself tuned into the audience--some at the theater for the first time-- laughing and reacting to the performance and then self censoring their audible responses with quick and effective shhh-ing...
2. Mat Fraser’s Beauty and the Beast:
Another way it challenged normalcy for me, perhaps unintentionally, was not through Fraser’s ‘abnormal’ body but in the abnormal behaviour of the characters. I’m not sure if the theatre makers were trying to say that “hello, I love you, let me touch you and fuck you” behaviour would be usual if our thoughts were externalized or, if that would be reading too much into it... In any case, I can’t say the incessant penis waving worked for me.
What was more memorable about that evening than the show itself though was the event-ness of it. The theater had a heterogeneous crowd in it; you didn’t get the sense that everyone knew everyone, which was perhaps influenced by the combination of it being an English language production and a part of the Niet Normaal programming. There were partial mannequins (etalagepoppen) dressed as abnormally as some school groups (earlier in the week) had thought possible, one of which scared the crap out of me when I opened the door to a toilet stall and thought I’d interrupted... My personal favorites were the ‘average joe’ masks strewn around the tables and the people putting them on-- ‘Joe’ is a composite of all the people who uploaded their images to the Niet Normaal website.
