A world without social conventions
The stage set is itself a work of art. For their latest performance, Rococo, Hotel Modern has transformed the Studio on the top floor of the Rotterdamse Schouwburg into an enormous junk room. There are old pieces of furniture, a heap of tools, leftover building materials and old clothes. Boxes that onze contained large electronic goods are stacked high and appear to be filled with yet more refuse: plastic skulls, for example, paint rollers and a remarkable number of plungers. Among all of these there are also stand tables with figurines and puppets.
Hotel Modern has become well known for performances in which they explore a particular theme and depict it with the help of miniature cameras and a stage floor filled with puppets, figurines and scale models. Inanimate objects are miraculously brought to life on a projection screen. In this way they enacted scenes from the two world wars in The Great War and Kamp. Rococo, though, is a theatrical investigation into curiosity and lust in which the scale models play only a supporting role. Among the mounds of debris on the stage floor there are two real performers – Pauline Kalker and Herman Helle. Each wearing a bear mask. Just why these two apparently primitive creatures have ended up in this disorderly place, but evidently they’ve just arrived. They quickly begin to explore this new world and turn it to their own ends. Objects are investigated and used in strange games. An obsessive curiosity takes hold of them. Boxes are pulled open and emptied out. Sink plungers and insulating material are used to make little figures. Boots are filled with water. Within an hour they work their way through the entire mess. They turn the junk room, which at first still had some degree of order, into a disgusting garbage tip.
The uninhibited way they treat everything is rendolant of children at play. Their naive way of dropping things when they’re finished with them re-enforces this impression. Unembarrassed, they make plastic skulls french kiss each other, stimulate puppets with huge erections (again with the finger camera) and play for a long time with a turd one of them has freshly produced.
The piece is brimming with these Freudian references. This imaginative representation of a world without social conventions, in which sensual impulses are given free rein, is simultaneously confrontational and funny. That there is another side to the unbridled human desire so vividly depicted in Rococo becomes apparent in the final image: we see the two figures in a kind of sad post-apocalyptic world. Everything has been used up and turned into rubbish. All that remains is survival.
24-12-2007
