The story of a 20m2 living room through years, events, living and non-living beings
© Antero Hein
© Antero Hein
A bare stage, lots of scenery and props stacked on either side, and five performers in black tights. This is the scene at the beginning of the play. All the material for the play is out in the open, not hidden. After 80 minutes, when the play ends, the scene is the same as it was at the beginning. During these 80 minutes we witness a narrative through which countless years, protagonists and stories pass. And all this narrative, this theatrical adventure, is performed by only five performers.
When the performers set up the living room in the stage space where the stories take place, they do so in a demonstrative way; for example, the stage lights are not dimmed and we are not suddenly confronted with the living room in a different date. The performers do not hide at the sides of the stage while they "dress up" the protagonists they play. They change from anonymous actors to protagonists in a demonstrative way.
The stories that take place in this living room are told not only by travelling back and forth between years, but also between scales. In addition to this living room, some of whose walls are repeatedly constructed and deconstructed on stage, many models of the same room in different scales are also used as part of the narrative during the play.
© Antero Hein
Space, the living room of a house set on stage, is the dominant element of the narrative. Throughout the play, we see the backward memory and forward future of the space overlapping. For example, in one of the following scenes, the place where the fireplace stands becomes the place where the first humans lit a fire millions of years ago.
Certain themes, events and situations overlap, sometimes in the same scene and sometimes in different ways at different points in the narrative: Music (a horn blown by someone dressed as a Viking thousands of years ago, a gramophone played in the 1930s, a singer practising in the 1890s, someone in 2022 who produces music as he moves with sensors implanted in his body); Dances (the rhythm and accents of the dance someone in 2007 is doing to techno music played on his headphones but given to us through the loudspeaker, and the rhythm and accents of the dance around the fire danced by the first people millions of years ago); Movements (the movements of people doing different things in the living room at five different times; a mechanic changing a light bulb in a chandelier, a burglar entering through a window, someone stretching after a run, someone leaving the house, someone walking around with a baby in her arms); Thieves entering the living room at different times. The sun approaching the window of the living room and covering everything in a dream that a protagonist repeatedly describes having in the 1985s is combined in one of the following scenes with the possible end of the world, visualised by a slide projection, with the result that the sun grows ever larger and swallows the world. The use of models in the play coincides with the main story of the play, in which the old man, who dies in 2005, is engaged in making a model of his living room as a hobby in the scene just before his death. When the ceiling of the living room leaks in 1975, the water in the buckets placed in the room by the protagonist is poured into the model of the living room, which is brought onto the stage in the scene immediately afterwards, representing the year 2103, and the flood in which the room is completely submerged is simulated. The shooting of a protagonist in the living room in 1894 is superimposed on the protagonist who rents the house in 1975 and says: "I love the energy of this house, there is life here".
While presenting such a broad, comprehensive and multi-layered narrative in a playful and intricate way, using many theatrical techniques together, it is a great skill not to lose the poetry in small details, such as the movement of the fish in the spherical aquarium placed on the fireplace in the living room, or the fall of a single leaf left on a tree that existed thousands of years ago on the site of this living room.
© Antero Hein
As a spectator I am confronted with a production full of exciting, entertaining and creative theatrical ideas, presenting narrative and narrative forms on stage at the same time, mixing different but all analogue narrative forms and presenting them without hiding them, with a very precise mathematics and timing that works like clockwork. When I say creative theatrical ideas, I mean the way a performer drips water from a syringe onto a model of the living room next to the stage and picks up the sounds of the drips with a microphone placed on the floor of the model, while a protagonist places buckets in different parts of the living room as if water were dripping from the ceiling; I'm talking about things like a protagonist in the living room space on stage blowing up a balloon with his mouth, as the story goes, while three performers preparing for the next scene on the sides stop what they're doing and plug their ears in anticipation of the balloon bursting.
The fact that such a broad, comprehensive and multi-layered narrative is presented in a playful and intricate way, using many theatrical techniques together, while the poetry created by such small details as the movement of the fish in the spherical aquarium placed on the fireplace in the living room, or the falling of a single leaf from a tree that existed thousands of years ago on the site of this living room, is not overlooked, proves to me how skilful the creators of the show, who are also the performers, are.
I can watch this show until the morning without getting bored and I can write about this show, the theatrical details, ideas and inventions in this show until the morning. Which show am I talking about? DÉJÀ by the Krumple/Collectif Krumple, which I saw at the Festival Off Avignon 2023.
© Antero Hein
© Antero Hein
the Krumple/Collectif Krumple adapted DÉJÀ from Richard McGuire's graphic novel Here. Having researched the visuals of McGuire's novel on the Internet out of curiosity, I am also pleased to see that the Krumple/Collectif Krumple adaptation does not visually emulate McGuire's world, but has created its own world on stage.
DÉJÀ was premiered at the Stamsund International Theatre Festival in Norway in 2019, and went on tour to various cities in Norway and the Espace Paul Éluard near Paris in the same year. As part of the 2023 edition of the Festival Off Avignon, DÉJÀ was presented on the stage of La Manufacture - Château de Saint-Chamand from 7 to 24 July at 12.25 pm every day except Wednesday. After leaving the first performance on the 7th July with astonishment and admiration, the next afternoon I took the shuttle bus to the Château de Saint-Chamand, 15 minutes from the city centre, with my friends with whom I had come to Avignon, to enjoy this unique show a second time.
Vincent Vernerie, Léna Rondé, Jo Even Bjørke, Oda Kirkebø Nyfløtt, Jon Levin and David Tholander, who come from different disciplines such as acting, directing, music, puppetry and magic and whose paths crossed during their studies at the École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris, founded Krumple in Norway in 2013 and then the Collectif Krumple in France. I highly recommend that you follow them and if you come across their shows anywhere in the world, do not miss them.
© Antero Hein
[The Turkish version of this article was published in Tiyatro Tiyatro Dergisi on July, 26th 2023.]
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