No words necessary in ingenious puppet show
The stage leaves nothing to the imagination: to the left, barracks behind barbed wire; to the right, officers quarters with the gate decorated with the letters spelling out ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’; and centre stage, the end of the railway line.
The scale model of Auschwitz concentration camp is kneehigh, the prisoners and guards are small wire puppets the size of a carrot.
The three members of Hotel Modern theatre company – visual artist Herman Helle and the actresses Pauline Kalker and Arlene Hoornweg – move over and around the buildings. The puppets are shifted about, arranged for a colossal roll call; with the help of string and wooden strips they move wheelbarrows, trucks roll by, and sand is shoveled with implements smaller than the smallest teaspoon.
But still one can see precisely what the hundreds of finely detailed puppets are doing; stooping or kneeling, Helle films their activities with a finger camera and the scenes are projected on the rear wall.
Stage left, smeared as if with burnt human fat, there already stands a cardboard crematorium. Apparently though, this furnace does not suffice, and directly behind it a second is being built: pulleys pay out string and pull a second chimney upright with a thud. ‘Well that’s that done then’ might have been a suitable line here, but not a word is spoken in the puppet theatre and animation film Kamp. In an earlier piece, The Great War, Hotel Modern depicted in theatrical miniature the horrors of the trenches during the 1914-18 war. The grandfather of actress and designer Pauline Kalker was murdered in Auschwitz. ‘He’ll never know I exist’, says Kalker, ‘but I must do this for him, I must know what it was like there.’
Without fuss and without a scintilla of pretence, the camera and the finger tips are right there when the mini prisoners (many dressed formally) arrive with the last train, are gassed, and pushed into the ovens one after the other just as artillery shells are shoved into a cannon.
The playfulness of the puppetry is drenched in rage from the outset: hollow-eyed and with contorted mouths, the tiny victims walk jerkily to their death. Although the manner in which puppetry and film balance each other is both subtle and ingenious, it is the scale model itself that tells the most powerful story. Together with the scarcely audible nightbird song when, but for the punt searchlights, the cardboard concentration camp is enveloped in utter silence and darkness.
17-11-2005
