Incentive Prize for Puppetry 1999

For the last two years no suitable candidate has been found to be encouraged to go further along the puppet and object theatre route. It was therefore with some expectation of disappointment that the jury once again set to work. Regrettably, we rarely encountered scintillating new work, and the dramaturgy often left much to be desired.

Happily, there was one performance that made the jury exceptionally optimistic and upbeat. City Now by the young group Hotel Modern – designer Herman Helle and actresses Pauline Kalker and Arlène Hoornweg – offers an agglomeration of talent. Using an enormous assemblage of empty boxes and other packaging material, along with a sophisticated lighting design and an evocative soundscape, they create a metropolis. For a night and a day, the audience is submerged into the seething, noisy chaos that is City.

Fridge boxes form a realistic skyline. Tiny illuminated elevators shoot up and down, while on a roof a collection of elegant perfume bottles stroll about at a sophisticated party. Earlier, from the same roof, a banana threw himself down in a suicidal act. A six pack of beer drifts through the night like a mob of babbling football supporters, and behind the red lit windows of a brothel, and erotic shadowplay can be spied upon. Occasional moments of rest are built into the visual spectacle, and at these times the macro level is left behind to zoom in on the lives of the citizens behind the doors of their cardboard boxes, caught in the intimacy of their domestic existence. And some of them burst out in bizarre and ultimately hilarious monologues.

And so we sit, glued to our seats and won over by the evident pleasure of those working onstage and also by the continually surprising visual language, which is understandable for a wide range of audiences. After a seemingly endless line of bread rolls has passed, a large loaf comes around the corner. ‘Ah, the bus!’ exclaims the neatly dressed, grey-haired gentleman sitting in front of us. It is perhaps a particular attribute of puppet and object theatre that it speaks both to the child in the adult and to the adult in the child. An attribute the makers of City Now most surely possess. It is, therefore, with unanimity and pleasure that the jury wishes to award the incentive prize to Hotel Modern.

1999