Mourning at the funeral of a recalcitrant shrimp drifter

It begins with a funeral. In the ceremony room, two shrimps prepare for the event. They carefully inspect the impersonal space with its inevitable ‘artwork’. They contemplate the artwork and muse upon it until it suddenly takes on a life of its own. And one shrimp says to the other, ‘Yes, indeed. Very modern.’

That, then, is a Shrimp Story – or an example of one. This one has not yet reached its conclusion, when the focus shifts briefly to a maternity room, where a shrimp is giving birth. From there it moved along to a rubbish belt with shrimp tramps, to a cafe where a shrimp tries to hawk roses to uninterested shrimp clients, and to a petrol station, an exorcism, a boxing match, a discotheque, a wedding and a zoo – there’s nothing you can imagine that shrimps don’t get up to… that we don’t get up to. Or is it the other way round?

Shrimp Tales, the latest work by Hotel Modern, is another in the best tradition of this trio, one that has gained in prominence over the last ten years by developing its very own theatrical form. In productions by Hotel Modern visual arts, animation, music, performance and a special filming technique are brought together in a truly singular way. They take scenes from the Great War, Auschwitz, the battered Twin Towers, and other, apparently everyday, events, and stage them beautifully, with humour and compassion.

And so one could watch for hours as shrimps do things one would generally think were reserved for humans. One can laugh, one can be moved and at the same time one can be astonished by the exquisite way in which it is made. On tiny table stages, the three deviser-actors draw together an incredible variety of objects and manipulate them to create a scene – sometimes using a video camera, sometimes not. These are transformed into films projected onto a screen at the rear of the stage; the theatre takes place on the stage, where the actors dart nimbly from table to table, each awaiting the telling of its own story.

Shrimp Tales is, then, a mosaic performance with shrimp characters that meet each other and lose touch; sad, strange and beautiful stories of trembling pink bodies and melancholy beady eyes, whom we recognise and become attached to – and for whom we can mourn at a funeral.

11-02-2009