Hotel Modern stages atrocities in miniature
Like children utterly absorbed for hours on end as they evoke worlds with a handful of puppets, toy cars, buildings and trees, in Our Empire, Hotel Modern’s third animated play, the cast create their own universe from tiny figures fashioned from cardboard, wire and clay. But this is no innocent children’s game, because in this play Hotel Modern bring to the stage the barbaric atrocities carried out by the Dutch in their 17th-century colony of Indonesia. The resulting scenes are as horrendous as they would have been at a larger scale.
At the start of the play Herman Helle, one of the
three theatre practitioners who make up Hotel Modern, talks about his own roots
in the Indonesian region: his ancestor the frigate captain Pieter Helle
fathered the first of many generations who grew up in the Dutch East Indies. This
knowledge immediately brings history up close, ensuring our transition into the
colonised archipelago between 1600 and 1680 is a short one.
On the stage stand three large tables decked with
scale models – built by the members of the company – of the Indonesian islands
Java, Banda and Ambon. There we see the oceans, the Dutch East India Company
vessels, the beaches, rainforests and villages, and the colonial capital and plantations.
Hotel Modern use these models to tell of how the Dutch established their
monopoly on the spice trade, and of the atrocities that went hand-in-hand with
this process. The tiny figures representing the colonisers have had dog’s heads
– creepy and milky white. The same narrative line is followed three times: the
Dutch arrive, murder everyone in sight, pit communities and kingdoms against
one another, sow discord, lie, cheat, and crush with the most terrible violence
– and without the slightest qualm – any expression of freedom or autonomy. A
tiny camera is used to film the highly detailed and perfectly choreographed
miniature battles that are projected, larger-than-life, on a big screen.
Co-creator Arthur Sauer accompanies the events with an
ingenious live soundtrack made using Indonesian gongs and drums, dusters,
coconuts and – surprisingly – celery stalks, which turn out to be highly
effective instruments for mimicking the sounds of snapping bones, a knife
twisting in a human’s stomach, and a rat gnawing on reeds.
Expectations were high for this play, based as it is on the same techniques and approach Hotel Modern used for two earlier productions: The Great War and Kamp. And it rises to those expectations. The complexity of interaction between narrator-puppeteers Herman Helle, Pauline Kalker and Arlène Hoornweg is breath-taking as they blend performative domains: the documentary, the audio play, the war film, the history lesson. The ensemble has chosen not to incorporate a first-person protagonist, which serves to hold the audience at a distance. Is that a bad thing? I don’t think so. Our Empire is a cry of dismay, a stabbing index finger pointing at our colonial past, saying ‘Look at this! This is who we are!’
13-01-2020
