Hotel Modern play a serious game of dolls

Place two empty fruit-juice or milk cartons on the theatre floor and make a toy airplane crash into them. Film that with a miniature camera, project it on a big screen at witness the fear and dread it creates in the auditorium. This is what is happening: the 9/11 attacks are being brought to life in the slumbering memory of the spectator, and apparently this primitive animation of two collapsing towers makes a greater impact than the endlessly repeated clips of that poignant moment itself.

But that is not all. Using these hand-moulded puppets it is possible to create an impression of what happened that day deep within the towers. In their desperation the puppets cling to each other, throw themselves from the window. Or they do other things that grownups do when in utter despair. It is impressive, terryfing, shocking – although they are never more than mere puppets. Apart from Hotel Modern there are few theatre companies that understand so well that the power of the human imagination is enormous, that it is all but infinite. And there are few who have so often put it so explicitly to the test. The production The Man with Five Fingers (season 2004-2005) does not only contain the scene with the WTC towers, but also the tragic events in the life of a Jewish family during the Second World War and, to round off this wealth of images and athmospheres, a fateful encounter between a girl and a unicorn. It is soemtimes amusing, but it is repeatedly death that prevails, and appears, literally, personified as Death, to take stock – using a laptop.

Despite the variety, the performance remains consistent – and the same goes for almost everything Hotel Modern make. Live actors and filmed images, scale models and human-scale props coexist and form a coherent whole. […] Hotel Modern was founded in 1997 and the nucleus of three theatre makers collaborate with other artists, theatre actors and composers on a per-project basis. Arlène Hoornweg and Pauline Kalker are actresses – both graduated from the Arnhem Theatre School – and Herman Helle made his name as a visual artist and model maker. Hotel Modern has a unique place in Dutch theatre. Although other companies use scale models, animations and projections on a more or less regular basis […], Hotel Modern is unique because it uses this medium, this ‘miniature city scenography’, to explore great, important, adult themes. As the group says: ‘We practive black humour, try to give shape to difficult subjects in a light and playful way.’

The Holocaust, for example, is just such a difficult, emotionally charged subject – so charged in fact, that the words ‘for example’ seem misplaced here. In the performance Kamp Hotel Modern appear to be testing the boundaries of possibility in this type of theatre. It presents the audience with a day in the life – and, more often than not, death – of Auschwitz concentration camp. The group built the camp in miniature, ‘true-to-life’. As an audience member, one is immediately thrown into disarray on entering the theatre: those barracks, those watchtowers, as well as those train wagons and barbed wire fences are tucked away somewhere deep in the colletive unconscious. Seeing it this way, displayed in three dimensions, is an exceedingly uncomfortable experience.

The three members of Hotel Modern start to crawl around the stage on all fours. They bring 8cm-tall puppets to life, tiny human figures made of wire, clay and black-and-white striped fabric. One, for example, attempts to escape and is gruesomely electrocuted in the barbed wire, and another succumbs to the heavy physical labour and is beaten excruciatingly slowly by a guard, until death inevitably comes. At other times, the camera tracks cardboard sheets covered with standing puppets. Hotel Modern made thousands of them. They disembark train carriages; they go to barracks, to gass chambers, to crematoria. There are no spoken lines, only sound effects and occasionally music. There is no acting: this is a serious game.

The reality of Auschwitz has been expressed a thousand times in feature films, documentaries and books, and almost always in a direct and confrontational way that leaves little room for the imagination. In Kamp, Hotel Modern allows each audience member to make his or her own ‘imagining’ of the reality. The makers do not show how Auschwitz was, rather the audience imagines how it could have been. For those observers of a sensitive disposition, the hour-long performance is one of internal discomfort and denial, albeit not continual, because the technology on display also pulls on one’s attention, as do the procedures the members of Hotel Modern carry out – the deft manipulations. Occasionally the latter dominates and the foundation of the performance is weakened. And afterwards there remains a sense of uncertainty: was it only the horrors of Auschwitz that one was touched by, or eqully Hotel Modern’s ingenious wizardry that held us in thrall.

In Kamp, Hotel Modern employ similar techniques to those seen in The Great War – the production that put the group on the map. And not only in the Netherlands, because The Great War has now been performed throughout Europe and was recently put on again in Poland and northern France, the very area, that is, as it were, the ground on which the performance was built. And during the 2006-2007 season too, performances of The Great War will be alternated with those of Kamp. This will allow the audience to experience a three-dimensional animated portrayal of the two great wars of the last century.

In The Great War Hotel Modern blend form and content more successfully than in Kamp. This is perhaps due to the fascinating texts used – these consist partly of authentic letters from soldiers in the trenches to their loved ones at home – and composer Arthur Sauer’s inventive soundscape that at one moment creates an interesting interplay with tekst and image, and the next enters into a duel with them. There seems to be even less leeway between historical reality and theatrical illusion in The Great War than in Kamp. The parsley trees, the plant-spray rain and the bombardment of spluttering sparklers: the innocent nature of these ingredients contribute to a superior form of deceit and the audience is helplessly dragged into an breathtaking inferno.

The Great War has become a miniscule memorial – one distinguished by its symplicity – for the millions of soldiers who departed this life in the fire and the mire of the First World War. The same can be said of Kamp in relation of the millions of victims of the nazi regime. But Hotel Modern also seek out meaning in contemporary issues, as exemplified in the performance In Exil. It is about the long wait and the oppressive sense of insecurity that generally confronts asylum seekers and it concerns people who have left a whole life behind them, who are not a part of Dutch society but who must live within it, in tiny, cheerless bedsits.

Those who speak about Hotel Modern are apt to use words like ‘scale models’, ‘animations’ and ‘projections’. And it is true that these elements have pretty much become the group’s trademark. But it should not be forgotten that first and foremost Hotel Modern makes performances of enormous social ans political significance. It is precisely the group’s ability to transcend technical ingenuity and individual anecdote that determines its exceptional position and its high-quality. Hotel Modern creates theater performances that stimulate the imagination in a very particular way, but additionally, ans this virtue is equally important, the group repeatedly produces work that inspires reflection.

ONS ERFDEEL
Flemish-Dutch cultural magazine
June 2006