Award for Hotel Modern's entire body of work

The judging panel of the 2019 Wim Meilink Award on the winners Hotel Modern

‘Great stories told in a game played with trash, objects and illusion’: that’s the essence of Hotel Modern’s theatre. The words come not of the panel of judges for the 2019 Wim Meilink Award, but from [group members] Pauline Kalker and Arlène Hoornweg themselves – from some interview or other. Together with Herman Helle they form a theatre-making trio that has built up a modestly sized but utterly stunning body of work made up of memorable plays-in-miniature that bring far-reaching stories within reach. The group and their individual works have been honoured with many prizes, but these giants of the small-scale have never been properly acknowledged for their entire oeuvre. We are now putting that omission to rights.

Let there be no doubt that when this panel embarked on its deliberations for the 2019 Wim Meilink Award, several other major names passed the revue, and it would be remiss of us not to mention them. In our shared reflections on the unique history and traditions of puppetry in the Netherlands we were struck by the remarkable leaps and bounds that were made from Wim Meilink to Jan Klaassen, and from the iconic abstractions of Feike Boschma to the robot performance by Theatercollectief Urland. And moving among them are such great puppeteers as Fred Delfgaauw, Theo Terra, Elout Hol, Servaes Nelissen, Ulrike Quade, Duda Paiva… and let us not forget Gérard Schiphorst and Marije van der Sande from TamTam Objektentheater. They are illustrious and dangerous company indeed – and you’ve probably just thought of someone else whom we’ve scandalously neglected to mention. All we are trying to do is get across just how rich and unique this region of the Dutch theatre landscape is, and how very much puppet theatre and object theatre deserve to be captured in all their glory in word and image and shared far and wide.

While we were deliberating, one of the judges pointed – quite casually – to a theatre journal lying on the table. On the cover was a photo of Herman Helle. Hotel Modern. The name had been mentioned. And in that moment the judges had made their decision. Unanimously. In choosing Hotel Modern we want to spotlight a unique trio of artists whose work forms a crucial link in the transition from figurative puppetry to the more abstract idiom of object theatre. It all began in the 1990s with Herman Helle’s maquettes, the miniature cities of matchbox buildings and string motorways that he made for well-known architects – much more recently Helle built an incredible miniature version of the great city of Frankfurt out of erasers, sponges, dice and bottle tops. In the intervening years, he and Pauline Kalker and Arlène Hoornweg created some of the most original theatre-based storytelling ever witnessed in the Dutch arts. Two already legendary works are The Great War (2001) and Kamp (2005), in which the horrors of, respectively, the First and the Second World War are brought to life using finger-sized cameras in a miniature world populated by tiny figures fashioned from wire, fabric and clay. Other memorable images from their work include the skyline of fridges in City Now and humanity portrayed with shrimps in Shrimp Tales.

Hotel Modern’s plays and storytelling technique have already been extensively analysed and praised for their uniqueness on numerous occasions, so there’s no need for us to duplicate that here. Simply put, though, for those who do not know Hotel Modern, the company has become famous for its wayward, light-hearted and profound choreography of objects, film and illusion.  The actors create animated films live onstage, and the audience is able to watch not only the film being projected on a screen, but also the players carefully creating each scene and moving among the miniature sets; the audience sees the cast creating a possible world before their very eyes. But what is perhaps most remarkable of all is the extent to which the spectator’s own imagination is activated. In short, we have to do the rest for ourselves. The audience is presented with a simple code, such as bread rolls passing by to the accompaniment of car sounds. ‘After that, a loaf of bread becomes a bus, and a baguette becomes an aeroplane,’ explains Pauline Kalker, with Herman Helle adding that ‘Once you’ve given your audience a way in, they can complete the picture for themselves in their own head. Imagine you stick a sprig of parsley in soil. If you screw up your eyes and squint at it you’ll be able to see a tree in a landscape. A sprig of parsley isn’t a tree, of course, but if you create the right context, it suddenly becomes one. The audience sees the parsley and transforms it into a tree in their own minds, while at the same time watching how the illusion is created onstage. All these elements reinforce one another.’

It can’t be as simple as that, surely? Apparently, it is. That’s how it works. But Hotel Modern seem to be doing something else, something magical, by surreptitiously tapping into our deep-seated need to gain some control and oversight on our chaotic and frightening world. This is perhaps the crux of what theatre, culture and performance are all about. We’ve all built miniature worlds, with sand, clay, Lego or Barbies, or with words, musical notes, paint or a computer. Writing in the Volkskrant [Dutch daily newspaper] journalist Vincent Kouters once described Hotel Modern’s puppet cast as ‘mini-people struggling on and trying to survive’. Aren’t we all just mini-people struggling on and trying to survive? Hotel Modern do us the service of transposing the big, grown-up world into the small-scale realm of the everyday. Our deepest fears and desires are brought into the manageable domain of make-and-do, a world in which your own imagination and feelings are free to roam at will. How improbably everyday and grand is that? All praise to them. All praise and deep respect.’

The judging panel: Corien Baart (creative producer / dramaturge), Rieks Swarte (theatre maker and winner of the 2017 Wim Meilink Award), Carlos Langoeira (Theater Munganga), Frans Hakkemars (secretary on behalf of NVP-UNIMA)