Life on Earth by hundreds of shrimps

‘Test, test, test…,’ says the funeral director, a hunched-over shrimp wearing a top hat. His colleague sweeps the floor and comments on the dusty macramé wall hanging: a typical crematorium art work, even if the shrimps do love it. The next of kin wait in a room next door. Just before they enter, the camera leaps to a maternity ward where a child is being born. A baby shrimp lies in a pool of blood.

This prologue of a cremation is also the prologue of Shrimp Tales in which Hotel Modern play out fifty short scenes from life on Earth – in one hour. Uniquely, the roles are taken by three hundred dead shrimps.

Hotel Modern make a unique form of object theatre. They project live animation film; you can watch the film and simultaneously see it being made. Ingeniously constructed miniature film sets stand atop tables: an electric chair, a boxing ring, an operating theatre and so on. Members of the cast walk among these sets with cameras, filming the scenes and projecting them on the screen. Three, sometimes four, actors stand over the scale model and use wires to manipulate the shrimps, scenery and props, while on the left of the stage a virtuoso Foley artist creates a live soundtrack.

These puppeteers used similar techniques for The Great War, about the First World War, and Kamp, about Auschwitz. As a respite from these doom-laden themes, they then went on to make Rococo, pornography with Biedermeier statuettes. The Great War is their masterpiece, because it is here that form and content are in perfect balance and the collision between the two results in a gripping experience. In The Great War it is all about the field of tension between the epic, dark story and the tinkering about in the world of playthings, and about the sensational results that end up on the screen. In other performances form takes precedence. Kamp is more of an installation than a work of theatre.

Technically speaking, Shrimp Tales is their most ambitious project, given the large number of short scenes that have to be set in rapid succession. It is also ambitious with respect to content, because it is life itself that they want to capture. We see births, deaths, disease, poverty, a boxing match, brain surgery, a moon landing, a rave, two tramps on a garbage dump, people going out to eat, a flower seller killed with a pair of scissors, the execution of a condemned man, and so on.

You can gape in wonder endlessly at the way the scale models have been built, with matchboxes as petrol pumps and a cast-off computer part as a spaceship. When it is over, the audience is invited to walk around the stage and take their time inspecting the miniature sets. There is no overarching story. Most scenes consist of a fascinating tableau taken from life. This sometimes comes across as being somewhat arbitrary, and one might sometimes wish they had added some more dialogue or given it a more personal twist. The best scenes are the ones in which they do this.

The high point is the darkly absurd episode of the TV programme Antiques Roadshow combined with an autopsy. We see shrimps standing in line carrying tiny paintings or dolls house furniture on their back. The one at the front has brought along a corpse. The connoisseur expertly assesses the body of the doll (not a shrimp in this case): ‘It is a girl aged about thirteen – in absolutely perfect condition. There’s just a little damage between the legs.’ He can tell from the ant eggs at the hair follicles that she has been dead for a few weeks. The man who brought the girl’s body found her in a ditch behind her house. The connoisseur estimates her value to be between 15,000 and 20,000. A similar comical combination of genres is used in a scene with echoes of Liaisons Dangereuses. A tax consultant in an 18th-century set write a letter to a countess, and it is this setting which gives an amorous charge to the dry financial correspondence.

In a film that can be viewed on Hotel Modern’s fantastic website (along with another film, about 9/11, in which they use apple juice cartons for skyscrapers) the makers explain that they used shrimps because they want to observe humanity as a species of animal.

In the final scene, the scale models have been deserted and winged shrimps glide overhead. As in the film Wings of Desire, they look down with compassion on human struggles.

11-02-2009