Dries Verhoeven’s theatrical world: based on spectators’ experience
published on ART UNLIMITED 42 (September 2017)
I
was let into a room, all alone. One of the walls of the room, no larger than
the living room of a house, was completely covered by an image. It was a scenery
from Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti: taken from a hilly area, in the
foreground a mud puddle with lots of garbage, just behind it a jerry-built house
with other jerry-built houses in the background and behind them all low hills
and the sky; a time of twilight. While I could not figure out if the image was
moving or not, a shirtless black man sitting on the edge of the puddle stood up
and approached me. First, he stared at me, then began to mirror my moves, my
poses, my positions in the room. I was a little bit nervous as I wondered how
the man in the picture could see me and imitate me. I was surprised to realize
that the moving picture was not pre-recorded as I thought before, and was live
instead. The man was nice, young and friendly, so my nervousness de-escalated.
After a short while he ceased to imitate me and instead started to direct me,
not with words, but with movements; for instance, he pointed to the place where
I should stand in the room. We were facing each other; he stood on top of the
garbage in the puddle and I was in the middle of the bone-dry room. Then he
leaned down and turned on a tape recorder. Rhythmic local music began to play
and he began to dance with his lithe body. He demanded that I imitate him.
I was shy and uneasy at first, a little bit tense due to the unusual situation
I found myself in: I was dancing, in a somewhat large room in the backstage of
a theatre in Berlin, at an hour long after midnight, face to face with a black
man from Port-au-Prince via live video footage. We were communicating through
our bodies. In those five minutes there were only the two of us; occupying two
different places on earth but the same time span. We were two different people from
two completely different economic, societal, cultural and spatial environments,
but we shared a common thing during that time span. Then he approached me; his
face covered the whole screen. He thanked me with a vaguely Mona Lisa-like
smile and got out of the picture. So, my time to leave the room had also come.
Guilty Landscapes
photo by Jan Duerinck
Guilty
Landscapes is an episodic work by
the Dutch artist Dries Verhoeven. Since May 2016, in each episode of this work,
performers and spectators from different parts of the world have been connected
via live video. After experiencing, live in person, that shared environment of
time-of-beyond-space, it is impossible not to reconsider anew this technology
which most of us use in our everyday life of Western standards. It is also
impossible not to admire the artist who employs this ordinary technology at our
disposal in the service of such a genius idea. Thus, Verhoeven creates a
powerful work that turns upside down the roles of the performer and the
spectator, that obscures the relationship between the spaces in which the two
exist, and that lets them experience the same time span by doing so.
Verhoeven
states in the brochure: "People sometimes ask me about the how and why of
a work. But why talk when my work is merely speaking in images? Why clear up
when ambiguity is in the core of the work." This discreet approach relates
completely to Guilty Landscapes, where communication consists only of
mimicry, gestures, and movements, in other words through the whole body. So
indeed, there is no need of words for communication; understanding, trust, and
empathy are enough.
Dries Verhoeven
portrait by Marijn Smulders
Born
in 1976, scenography graduate Dries Verhoeven is renowned in the Dutch theatre scene
for his designs that stretch and increasingly defy boundaries between the stage
and the auditorium, and which resemble more to installation works. He sees the
theatre as an event, as a collective experience merging the spectator and the
performer. So, he is seeking possibilities to include the spectator directly in
the production in radical and unexpected ways. He intends that the spectator
communicate with the work not through identifying with someone on stage but
through physical experience.
His
first works were influenced by the ‘theatre of experience’ popular in Holland
and Flemish Belgium. In this theater style directors like Ivo van Hove, Guy
Cassiers, and Marcus Azzini and Lotte van der Berg (with whom he has worked
personally), focus on the encounter between the performance space and the
audience’s emotions. What Verhoeven tries to introduce into this style is to emphasize
the role of the performer only to the extent that it stresses the work’s being in
the 'here and now:' in his own words "to take the performer entirely out
of the work." In this sense, one of his most impressive works was 2007’s U
bevindt zich hier (You are here), in which each solitary spectator lying in
a hotel-room-like box begins to realize that s/he is not alone when the
mirror-covered-400m2 ceiling slowly rises, letting all the other spectators in
the boxes see each other.
You are here
photo by Anna van Kooij
Wanna Play?
photo by Sascha Weidner
In
recent years, rather than theatrical works staged in indoor spaces or theater
buildings, Verhoeven has produced more works of visual art that use the public
urban space as a stage. In these recent works, he considers the spectator as an
accomplice and puts her/him in a position similar to that of a museum visitor so
that the spectators have "to decide for themselves how long they will stay
to look at the work." According to him, unlike the stationary theater
spectator who has to sit in a chair for a certain period of time, the museum
visitor in motion is "an actively thinking viewer." With this consciousness,
in his works in the public space, Verhoeven focuses primarily on the attention,
the partnership and the resultant experience of the passer-by. He thinks that
the value of art as an agent of critical investigation and the mission of
provocation as an instrument for exposing conventional habits has decreased.
Therefore, in his recent works he especially aims to question societal norms
and habits in the public space, and he succeeds. His 2013 work, Ceci n'est
pas..., which consisted of an extraordinary person displayed in a glass box
on a city square, was censored in the 2014 Helsinki edition by the police
because he presented the scene with an 84-year-old naked woman. In a similar
vein, he himself ended on the fourth day the 2014 Berlin edition of the ten-day
24/7 installation Wanna Play?, in which he put himself in a glass box
soliciting strangers on gay hook-up app Grindr and projected the resultant
conversations with other users onto a
screen outside in a public square due to the controversy on Facebook.
His
most recent project, 2017’s Phobiarama, is described as an immersive
live installation. With this work, Verhoeven returns to his first period of
experiential theatre and reduces the role of the visitor to that of a
stationary and passive spectator. However, the theatrical realm which he offers
to the spectator is worth experiencing. Phobia, derived from the Ancient Greek phobos
meaning 'fear,' is a suffix that forms a word according to the type of the fear
–for example, claustrophobia, or as a common fear in Europe and America in
these days, Islamophobia– but here it is used at the head of the title. As for
diorama, it refers to the miniature three-dimensional scene, in which models of
figures are seen against a background and in which real life is imitated as
literally as possible. So, Verhoeven had prepared a three-dimensional scene for
visitors which is some kind of an abstract simulation of real life.
Phobiarama
photo by Willem Popelier
Phobiarama
was displayed within the scope of
70th Holland Festival in Amsterdam in June 2017 in a black tent decorated
outside with bare lightbulbs, as on a fairground. It was placed in the middle
of Mercator Square. The Square is the centre of a neighbourhood created by the
famous Dutch architect Berlage as one of the first examples of the garden-city
idea in the 1920s, and today predominantly immigrants inhabit it. Every hour,
20 spectators in groups of two were allowed inside. They got on the
ghost-train-like cars connected to the ground via rail and took a 45-minute
ride around the big indoor space. They were confronting their fears; however,
these fears were very different from those of the ghost trains.
Verhoeven
had constructed an atmosphere of fear upon many factors fueling today's climate
of fear: Extreme right-wing or fascist governments, or terrorist organizations
that have succeeded in manipulating society through terror and security;
ecological rhetoric, such as climate change, which emphasizes how little time
the world has left without precautions, or which speaks of the potential harm
of synthetic products to humans; and, of course, the fear of the 'non-self,'
namely the 'other,' that has seized most of the world’s societies.
Phobiarama was a three-dimensional miniature world bred by all
these fears that take ordinary human life prisoner with the help of elements from
the real world. The monitors placed at the top corners of the walls were used
not only to display audio recordings of today's right-wing and fascist
politicians, but also to live-broadcast black-and-white images recorded by
cameras in that room, referencing the surveillance devices as the indispensable
feature of today's governments' control mechanism. The cars on the rail were
also used as objects that fueled the fear in the room, playing with various
speeds and directions; sometimes they moved very slowly, sometimes very fast in
reverse.
To
promote this uncanny realm of fear, Verhoeven not only created an exceptional
physical space with color, music, sound, and objects, but he also employed live
performers who went far enough, even if controlled, to have physical
interaction with the spectators. During the 45-minute piece, the same
performers played the roles of three different horror images. Among these, the
first one might have been the most ancient and primitive fear of mankind: the
bear walking on its hind legs. Under the bear costume was found a contemporary
collective horror image: the clown. The last one was the real-life appearance
of the performers. The performers, no longer in costumes, embodied the most
'ordinary' fears of the average white European citizen. They all were from non-European
races; North African, Middle Eastern or black. On top of that, they were all
very tall, tattooed bodybuilders. They could easily and instinctively be put
into the category of the 'other'; they could have been involved in criminal or
deviant activity or even escaped from prison.
In
this last crucial -and poetic- sequence of Phobiarama, Verhoeven
masterfully displays the gap between the visible and the real: he displays, in
front of the eyes of the spectators in an explicit and 'live' way, the artificiality
of fear and that fear is nothing more than a product of 'fiction'. He brings face
to face moving humans in the flesh, in other words, performers and spectators
in this environment while stripping and unwrapping the performers of the images
imposed on them by the 'ordinary fascist' gaze and everyday fears of the
spectators, and by enabling both the spectators and the performers to live
through this emotional experience in person.
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