Horrors at the hands of humans
When telling the story of the Holocaust, one effective way to overcome our sheer inability to comprehend the scope and scale of such atrocities is to zoom in on one or two stories: share one particular experience, in all its brutal specificity, and we have at least a small way into the event – the small details illuminate the larger whole. One theatre company from the Netherlands, Hotel Modern, takes a related approach in Kamp (Camp). The production depicts a typical day at the Auschwitz concentration camp, but instead of zooming in into a closeup, it shrinks everything down, literally, into miniature. It’s the accumulation of thousands of small details that has the impact in this case.
On the floor of the stage at the Enwave Theatre is a sprawling to-scale model of the camp, and filling it are thousands of tiny handmade figures. Three puppeteers loom over the mini-monstrosity and direct their creations’ actions (usually, two perform the movements while a third holds a small camera that allows the audience to get a close-up view, projected onto a back screen). Kamp begins with a group of figures lifting, pulling, and placing bricks to build one of the infamous furnaces. Immediately after, we zoom out to see a lone man sweeping the dusty ground beside three nooses. Throughout the hour-long performance, our view of the camp focuses in and zooms back out again so it delivers many perspectives – the individual victims, the larger plan and its thorough execution, and the invisible hands that orchestrate it all.
Then we have the puppets themselves. Be prepared to have them haunt you a good time after you leave the theatre. While the officers have flat paper print-outs of pristine uniforms, prisoners are dressed in patchy and frayed striped cloth with their wire bodies sticking out, brittle bones and rib cages poking through holes in their clothes. The one uniting feature of all the puppets are their stark white faces, unmistakeably handmade with clay. Hotel Modern is not going for realism here: heads are misshapen, noses are deformed, eyes are often deep, dark, and lopsided, mouths are gaping.
There is no dialogue in Kamp: sound plays almost as an important a role in the production as the visuals, and it is expertly done. Loud brass music opens the performance like a movie, then returns as a marching band of the confined plays out the end of a work day, or when a group of officers delight in a night of debauchery. But instead of depending on music, the show is mostly set to simple sound effects: a broom, a cart, the piercing screech of an arriving train, the scrape of a man’s tongue against the bottom of his empty bowl, the whack of an officer’s baton.
The events we witness in Kamp aren’t exactly what will unsettle you (though you may be surprised by how upset you’ll be over the torture of a puppet), because as hard as it is to say this, we’ve seen it before. What’s different about Kamp is the way that it’s displayed for you. Part of what makes Kamp so engrossing to watch is the sheer effort that went into creating it: every detail, every building, every tiny broom, every suitcase filled with tiny possessions like a golden menorah or a stuffed toy elephant, every single one of the thousands of tiny puppets with thousands of tiny handmade faces. And as one half of you delights in seeing the result of such time and care and effort, the other half of you knows that pales in comparison to the effort that went into creating the real Auschwitz, or into building a life that was swiftly and brutally destroyed.
Kamp‘s run at the World Stage is sadly very short. It closes this Sunday, so while the summer temperature momentarily dips, spend an hour inside to see this absolutely unique and heartbreaking production.
May 2013
