In the southwestern corner of Flanders, Belgium, they still say: ‘In wintertime it quakes and shudders under the ground.’ Rectangular swaths of thousands of white crosses mark the last resting place of the dead. This is where The Great War, the trench war, was fought between 1914 and 1918.

Hotel Modern recreates this unfathomable event as a war in miniature. A digital video camera films a small mound of potting soil with plastic soldiers in it – just like any young boy’s game; bunches of parsley become a forbidding forest of death, with treacherous mines and snipers among the idyllic greenery. Spluttering sparklers, that most innocent of fireworks, are used to create realistic illusions of exploding grenades and bombs. What the tiny camera sees is projected lifesize on a film screen. The International Film Festival Rotterdam is taking place elsewhere in the same building. This performance, The Great War, is a stunning example of drama employing both film and theater.

The stage is crammed to overflowing with equipment, cables and wires. On first impression it looks like this is going to be an evening out for technofiles only. But the intensity and the precision of the interplay between these toy soldiers and miniature tanks bespeaks not only technical ingenuity but also an understanding of drama. From the side of the stage the composer provided sound effects in a manner similar to old radio plays. A voice reads extracts from letters from French, Belgian, Canadian and English soldiers. There is literature in the form of All Quiet on the Western Front (1926) by Erich Maria Remarque. Horrific passages are read out unemotionally by a girl: about the bomb hidden in a wine bottle in a captured German bunker, about the glutinous mud in which corpses lie, rotting. Meanwhile, the actors, using this lifelike raree show, provide accompanying images.

What is truly astounding is that the gap between animation and reality gradually diminishes. The high point for me was the passenger ship torpedoed by Germans on a misty morning. It takes place in an auqarium. A black silhouette against a hazy silhouette, against an even hazier background. The tiny U-boat is a shark hunting its prey. The foley artist provides a deafening torpedo explosion.

It is just like the real thing. It is both art and art form, perhaps even fiction. Mustard gas hisses like the striking of a match. This is the only way of making the unimaginable bearable. The girl’s voice reads a letter from the soldier Prospert, a recurring theme in the performance: ‘If you have already died ten times, you live more intensely.’ Meanwhile a machine gun opens fire in the broom-bristle scrub. This performance makes unprecedented demands on the imagination, and stills the audience.

1-2-2001

Atop the mound of bodies a morbid battle standard flutters in teh wind: a leafless tree, the corpse of a soldier skewered onto it. We see in time-lapse how rain and then snow descends on the bodies, and how the human mountain is blanketed with a layer of mud. With each jump in time a smaller version of the soldier’s corpse hangs in the tree. Eaten away by the vultures.

In the shelter of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the First World War is being brought to life in a small auditorium in the Rotterdam City Theater. And although it is being brought to the big screen, it is without the millions available to a Steven Spielberg. ‘Live animation’ is what the members of the Hotel Modern-company call their medium. Like children playing with toy soldiers, they rush around with miniature tanks and uniformed puppets. The battlefield is a table covered with a layer of sand, where a bunch of parsley plays the part of a tree, and an upturned brush, dens thickets.

It is a horrific film. In a child’s wargame, no more damage is done by an explosion than a fallen plastic doll. On their battlefield, the makers of The Great War show the battlefield from the perspective of a soldier in the trenches of the First World War. In extracts from authentic wartime correspondence, read aloud, soldiers tell of the fumes and the stench, the fear and the blinding. Through the spyhole of a tank you see the panic of the wounded in its path. Stumbling through glutinous mud in the pitch darkness you feel the resilience of the corpse of a brother-in-arms.

Puppets have a hard time of it in the hands of these theater makers: gas burners, stink bombs and watering cans all make their appearance, along with the radio-play sound effects of foley artist Arthur Sauer. By blowing a whistle he creates the sqauwk of the vulture visiting the mound of corpses at the end of the performance. The paper vulture circles, attached to the end of a stick. And the switching of the body is performed by the giant hands of the puppeteers. The audience chuckles at their morbid inventiveness as they summon up these horrific scenes, but is also deeply impressed by the ‘realism’ as the toy soldiers transform into rotting cannon fodder.

3-2-2001

Toy tanks, Action Man figures, parsley, potting soil and powdered sugar are among the miniature props and everyday items used to recreate the horrors of the battlefront in Dutch live-animation company Hotel Modern’s 2018 Adelaide Festival show The Great War.

Hotel Modern made an impact at the 2013 Adelaide Festival with Kamp, a portrait of a Holocaust death camp, and The Great War – which draws on the real-life experiences of World War I soldiers – is said to be equally as powerful. In The Great War, puppeteers Herman Helle, Pauline Kalker and Arlène Hoornweg re-create scenes from the Western Front in a miniature set, with the action projected onto a large screen and accompanied by a soundtrack of live sounds created by composer and Foley artist Arthur Sauer. It is being presented at the Festival on the centenary of the armistice that ended World War I. “At this significant time, it is artists who best bring to life what the experience meant for ordinary soldiers on the front line of battle, and Hotel Modern has achieved this with stunning force and immediacy,” says Adelaide Festival co-artistic director Rachel Healy.

Below, Kalker, Helle and Sauer tell InDaily what they wanted to achieve with The Great War, and explain the ingenious ways they have managed to replicate everything from trees and snow, to explosions, smoke, and the sounds of machine guns and tanks. The Great War was adapted from interviews with World War I veterans, as well as the diaries and letters of soldiers.

What are some of the common themes of their accounts which the production conveys? Pauline Kalker: “We focus on the question what war is like for the people who are in the middle of it. We wanted to show the experience of the soldiers who fought in the trenches – what it was like to be a soldier in this war, in which so many horrible weapons like machine guns, poison gas and tanks were used, often for the first time in history. We were looking for detailed practical descriptions, like what did they see, hear, smell, feel; what was their daily life like. We also focused on what happened mentally, how the act of fighting and killing affected them, how they dealt with injuries and the death of their mates.

I understand the production draws on the letters of one particular French soldier, which were discovered decades after the war ended. Who was he and what happened to him? Herman Helle: “His name is Prospert. A friend of us had bought all Prospert’s letters, written to his mother during the war, in a secondhand bookshop in France. They cost a fortune. When the shopkeeper explained that was because of the fieldpost stamps on the envelopes, our friend took the letters out of their envelopes, and got them for a more or less symbolic price. We don’t know much about Prospert, apart from his name, that he had a sister, and that he used to live in Toulon, France. He wrote hundreds of letters – they all begin with “Chère Maman” (“Dear Mother”). In the beginning, his handwriting is almost childlike; during the war it develops and becomes more experienced. He loses his best friend, but survives the war, and his last letters (which are not in our show) are from Algeria, then a French Colony. He is still a soldier, he has signed on again, because, as he wrote, he doesn’t know what he would do in normal life, after what he has been through.”

What sort of everyday materials, toys and props are used to create and animate the horrors of the miniature world in The Great War? Kalker: “In The Great War, the landscape is the main character, as well as a metaphor for the people who are hidden in it in their trenches. In the beginning of the show, the landscape is fresh and green, and slowly it gets wounded and becomes a rotting mixture of mud, corpses, barbed wire and broken weaponry.” Helle: “We create this evolving landscape on stage, on a large table covered with potting soil – a lot of it. The props are a mixture of everyday materials, such as parsley for trees, powder sugar for snow (which melts beautifully as it starts raining out of a plant sprayer) and things that we made ourselves, like cardboard stairs going down to a dugout, a city under fire made of photocopies of postcards from that region and era, a World War II toy tank modified into a box-like tank from World War I. With the legs cut off from an Action Man figure, we stumble through the mud. Filmed up close. they look astonishingly real. You don’t need very sophisticated miniatures to create realism. Crudely made props and scenery can be very suggestive, precisely because they leave much to the imagination.”

How do you achieve such realistic-looking explosions, fire and smoke? Helle: “The fire is made with penetrating oil, sprayed and ignited. The flames aren’t that big, but filmed and projected on a big screen they look huge and intimidating. The explosions are made by blowing with a pressured air gun into the potting soil, so that earth flies all around. Combined with the loud sound effects. they look very realistic. For poison gas, we use dry ice; CO2 frozen solid. When we add boiling water, it produces a very heavy mist that creeps over the earth and the dead soldier puppets.”

Can you describe how some of the sound effects are created, and also how they add to the potency of the production? Arthur Sauer: “The sound gives a sense of continuity of location (you can hear things that are not visible in the image or fall outside the frame of the camera) and adds to the realism. For example, someone is running in no-man’s land during an attack during which there is a lot of bombing and shooting, the camera cuts to the inside of a house, but you still hear the sounds of this bombardment: you ‘know’ you are still in the same place, although you can’t see it. I decided to use both ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ sounds. A machine gun is played on a tin, with marbles inside, by rattlng with two xylophone sticks on top. In another part a machine gun is played by a sample of a recording of a real machine gun, which is sculpted in such a way that it shakes the audience. We also use the tin can to give an impression of the sound of a tank – by rambling a half coconut on top of the tine and pressing a running vibrator against it, backed up with a low droning electronic sound.”

What do you consider to be the most powerful moments or scenes in the production? Kalker: “There a several powerful moments – a gas attack is one of them, and the scene in which the audience gets to look through the eyes of a soldier who is in the middle of a heavy attack. Sauer: “To describe them all would be a spoiler, but what we can say is that the whole audience will be silent and impressed during the last scenes of the show…”

29-1-2018

This “live animation” show brings the claustrophobia, inhumanity and visceral muck of World War I to grotesque life using everyday items and miniatures: you’ll never be more affected by a dismembered plastic figurine.

Dutch company Hotel Modern returns to the Adelaide Festival, five years after its show Kamp moved local audiences with its miniature representation of life in a Nazi death camp. The set-up for The Great War is similar. On one side of the stage, Arthur Sauer controls an array of music and sounds – the clatter of machine-gun fire, the roar of artillery – and more subtle, but equally affecting, noises – the squelch of boots in the horrific soup of mud, rotting bodies and detritus. Elsewhere on stage, puppeteers Herman Helle, Pauline Kalker and Arlène Hoornweg manipulate miniature figures, mostly on a huge table covered in potting mix, but also in an aquarium which serves as a murky simulacrum of the English Channel. Cameras project the action onto a screen at the rear, so the audiences’ eyes can move from the “animation” to the performers themselves manipulating the scene and the cameras. The performance concept – if not the subject matter – may seem like intriguing fun but as the one-hour show progresses, the form becomes linked to the themes in a way which is, ultimately, very moving.

The show begins with a documentary-style description of the complex origins of World War I, with a top-down camera filming a vintage map of Europe. Various symbols are placed, with increasing freneticism as the situation deteriorates, on the map as Franz Ferdinand is assassinated, Germany invades Belgium, and country after country declares war. The narration rises to fever pitch, the words blurring as the history lesson devolves into chaos.

The performers move to the larger tables where the butchery takes place. Green fields and forests (represented by stalks of parsley, broom-heads and the like) are destroyed by gas-torches; clopping horse and carriage are replaced by metal tanks and tiny rolls of razor wire. From here, the narration is all (real) first-person accounts of the front. Elation at cutting down an enemy column is replaced by a litany of increasing despair: tank crews burning alive, a soldier with his leg blown off screaming in no-man’s land for hours, children and women drowning after a torpedo attack during an attempted Channel crossing.

As you might imagine, this requires intricate choreography by the performers who, at times, consciously allow their hands to come into camera shot: reshaping the landscape, moving vehicles and animals, placing tiny pieces of scenery. However, as the performance increases in tempo, we are brought into claustrophobic acquaintance with the fine detail of the trenches and soldiers under fire. The performers stage strategic retreats from view. With virtuosity, a single performer – at times – holds a camera in one hand, while recreating sprays of machine-gun fire with the other; we see through the eyes of individual soldiers, even, at one point, a nerve-wracking descent down the steps of a captured German bunker, rats scampering on the ground, an abandoned table set with a bottle of wine, corpses slumped on the floor. One of the most realistic and gripping pieces of puppetry involves a tight camera shot of the legs and boots of a soldier – squelching gingerly through the trenches. With our imaginations activated, the potting mix-landscape is filled with unseen horrors.

At the end, the performers invite the audience to come up to the stage, to see the props up close and ask questions. The audience – drawn from a very wide range of ages – were able to see the spent gas cartridges, inspect the tiny sets, and wonder at how everyday items can be transformed into such a haunting landscape. As with the appearance of the puppeteers’ hands in the shot, this proximity of the ordinary and the human with the brutalities of battle is actually part of The Great War’s power: the butchery of the war was wrought with relentless intentionality by human hands; the fields of France were churned with the blood of real men who once led ordinary lives filled with ordinary things.

It’s an ingenious, troubling performance.

9-3-2018

Up on a large movie screen, a verdant stand of trees rises out of dark, moist earth as birds chirp and a rabbit bounds into view. Never mind the gargantuan human hand that drops into the scene to manipulate the animal, which is little more than a toy figurine amid stalks of parsley jammed in the dirt; it is a scene of bucolic serenity. On the stage, just below the screen, performer Herman Helle removes the toy from a miniature movie set as sound artist/composer Arthur Sauer waves a lit blowtorch in front of a nearby mic, somehow creating the low rumble of an approaching storm. Helle lights his own torch and aims it at the set; onscreen, the scene erupts in billowing flames and the green forest seems to melt under the roaring conflagration.

Welcome to The Great War, a live, one-hour video puppet animation of the 1914-18 Western Front by the Dutch miniature theater troupe Hotel Modern. Since its founding in 1997 by actors Pauline Kalker and Arlène Hoornwg, the theater company has made an international reputation, tackling sprawling subjects normally off-limits to the theater — like world war or Nazi death camps — by staging them on a tabletop.

The text of The Great War is taken from a cache of actual letters written by a French soldier to his mother that was discovered in a Marseilles bookshop. But the scenes of muddy trenches, mustard gas attacks, howitzer bombardments and a corpse-strewn no man’s land created in front of the audience out of doll miniatures, toy soldiers and popsicle sticks are at once eerily familiar and whimsically removed — as if Stanley Kubrick were filming ‘Paths of Glory’ in a child’s sandbox.

According to Sauer, the show — and Hotel Modern’s performance aesthetic — originated in a 2001 conversation he had with Helle, a visual artist who was also working as a model maker for the architect Rem Koolhaas. Kalker wanted to do a theater performance using models and live video cameras, and Helle had come up with the idea of a dramatic “living landscape” set during the First World War.

“And since I’m a composer as well,” Sauer remembers, “he asked me to do something with a symphony orchestra. Then I said to him, ‘Yeah, if you are going to do the camera and all the images live, I will do all the sounds live. And so we will make like a live animation movie.’” “In the First World War, the landscape was a big drama,” Helle says. “And we can tell the story of the soldiers through the landscape, which becomes a sort of metaphor for what happens to the millions of soldiers.”

Blowing up toy dramas into cinematic spectacles turns out to be a potently poetic formula that Hotel Modern has parlayed into a repertoire of nine major shows. These include 2005’s Kamp, their acclaimed day-in-the-life puppet documentary about the Holocaust that is performed using 3,000 plasticine stick figures on a 36-by-33-foot cardboard model of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Then they created 2009’s Shrimp Tales, a sweeping, 50-scene tapestry of life and death in which humanity is portrayed by an ensemble of 300 dried shrimp.

“Puppets can have an interesting effect when you deal with very serious things on a great, grand scale,” Kalker observes. “We have this battle scene with a lot of fire and bombing, and there’s a lot of smoke. So the audience can also smell the war, because they can smell the smoke. And because they’ve decided to believe that the puppet is alive, when the puppet dies, the impact is also very big. Because you give the puppet life in your imagination, its death becomes really very emotional.”

Those paradoxical, childlike impulses of creative and destructive play — defamiliarized in Hotel Modern’s miniature epics — emerge as a trenchant comment on the real-life propensity of adults for periodic, near-apocalyptic self-annihilation. “Everything is dying or getting destroyed in our shows,” Helle says wryly. “But I think it has to do with our generation. We were raised by people who were in the Second World War in Europe. And there is an underlying idea that’s in our lives, from being raised by people who experienced prisoner of war camps, and the Holocaust, and the bombings of the cities, that things can change overnight.”

“We want to show the character of humanity as a species that is capable of doing horrible things,” Kalker adds, “but that is also not in charge. People make a mess, but they are not in control of the horrible things that they do. Most individuals are not bad. Yet very bad things happen.”

16-04-2015

As the centennial anniversary of World War I passes, the tragic loss of life can at times begin to feel remote; those history lectures whose dates and big battle names are the only resonating feature in the memories of subsequent generations. When my dad first proposed seeing Hotel Modern & Arthur Sauer’s production of The Great War, I had no idea what an amazing and inspiring performance I was in store for. It is difficult for me to express the depth of my admiration for this truly unique and astounding theatrical event. It is, in every sense of the word, a must-see production.

The performance employed scale models with items that create a world, such as parsley sprigs standing in for forests, and paper houses representing entire villages. These props are filmed up close to give the illusion of realistic settings, and are manipulated live on stage by the three skilled members of the group: Arlène Hoornweg, Herman Helle, and Pauline Kalker.

The play depicts the tragic events of World War I through the eyes of various soldiers from undefined countries as they go about their routines of brutal combat. Throughout the performance, first-person letters to the mothers, lovers, and families of soldiers were read as the audience followed the writers’ journey through the war. The anonymity of the soldiers created an unmistakable and moving sense of universality among the opposing members of the war and revealed the absolute futility of pitting these young men against one another without any understanding of the scope of the conflict.

In one grotesquely beautiful scene, the up-close and personal camera angles followed the carefully sculpted boots of a soldier trudging through soil as he encounters body after body of fallen troopers, indistinguishable as either friend or foe. Two of the more stunning visual effects involved the use of fire to burn down a compact paper town that appeared huge on screen, and the use of liquid nitrogen to represent flammable mustard gas scouring the fields of exhausted soldiers. However, by far the most haunting scene was from the perspective of a soldier within a tank firing at random as he describes in a letter how the tank rolled across this valley of death, often crushing soldiers in its path.

Arthur Sauer’s mastery of the music and sound effects that accompanied the performance elevated it to such a degree that even the sound of wind as dust blew over the bodies of forgotten soldiers could spark a tear in one’s eye.

As the play and the war went on, and the seasons slowly passed, the rains came burying the bodies in mud — then a sprig of green, and another and another until the entire hillside was overgrown, a truck pulling past unaware of the carnage that lay just beyond the path.

These letters were moving and occasionally stopped mid-sentence as the soldier who we were following was shot dead. The final image, a long slow pull back to the “Eye of God” view of a solitary soldier as he slowly makes his way home, was portrayed over a recording of a drunken French soldier jubilantly singing a liberation song as the camera pulls further and further away.

After the performance, as everyone wiped tears from their eyes, the audience was invited up to the stage to view the props and see for themselves how this tragic world was created. Hotel Modern produces an array of works ranging from depictions of death camps in World War II to portrayals of bustling cities and issues of marriage, life, and death to fun romps where human life is explored through the use of shrimps as mini-humans. Whatever performance you may have the pleasure of seeing, I can guarantee it will be tremendous.

29-04-2015

Last year marked the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I — a hellish anniversary, to be sure, but one that couldn’t go unmarked. Observe how the geopolitical consequences of that conflagration are savagely playing out in the Middle East, where national boundaries decided upon by the Allied victors following the brutal logic of their own economic interests have led to a century of strife and instability in the region.

Though historians are still arguing over the principal cause (apparently it’s a good deal more complicated than the multiple-choice answer “the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand”), there is no debating the calamitous waste of life, with the military and civilian death toll nearing 20 million in some estimates.

How can such overwhelming atrocity be understood? In small increments only, as The Great War, an ingenious live animation film created by Dutch theater company Hotel Modern and composer Arthur Sauer, artfully demonstrated this weekend.

The production simulated the battlefield horror through the deployment of miniature toy theater objects projected onto a screen. A table spread thick with potting soil was watered liberally to re-create the nightmare of the trenches. The power of the images — miniature soldiers trekking through mud littered with body parts, fire tearing through encampments, mustard gas leaving everything silent in its wake — was astonishing given the banality of the materials being used.

The audience’s attention was split between the screen and the stage activity behind it. The art retained its mystery, though the process of creation could be discerned in dim light. (After the show, audience members were invited onto the stage to get a closer look at how it was all done.)

The four-person ensemble moved with the discretion of Bunraku puppeteers. Herman Helle, Arlène Hoornweg and Pauline Kalker took care of the harrowing visuals and narration. Sauer, brilliantly manning an orchestral station of his own devising, was responsible for the demonic sound design.

The start of the war was dispatched in a preface performed on cartons covered with a map. To review the alliances, countries were designated with different-size cigars. Letters from the front were read to provide eyewitness accounts of the misery. The pale flesh of the forlorn soldier figurines contrasted starkly with the wet dirt. The growling of the war machine heightened the sense of physical vulnerability. Death was pervasive, but the fear of dismemberment and the guilt over dishonored corpses seemed to pose greater challenges to the psyche of soldiers.

‘War Horse’, the Tony-winning British import, brought the murderousness of World War I to life through breathtaking animal puppetry. The Great War, working on a much smaller and far less commercial scale, doesn’t set out to dazzle us in the same way. The audience was never allowed to lose sight of how the production’s scenic effects were produced. Thus, commodification, always a danger when transposing human tragedy to art, was cut off. The dirtiness of this historical re-creation implicated us all.

At the end, a mound of rotting bodies was turned into a ghoulish stew by snow and rain. Eventually, the corpses sank into the ground. Trees (parsley sprigs magically deployed) sprouted up in this field, oblivious to the carnage.

Nature has the final word, if not the last laugh. The technology that made World War I so lethal is now turned against the planet itself. The Great War, a modest, handcrafted multimedia gem, provoked such disproportionately big and chilling thoughts.

19-04-2015

En ces 11 et 12 Novembre, Transversales a transformé le théâtre municipal en salle de cinéma. Ou presque. Il y avait un grand écran, certes, mais également trois artistes du collectif néerlandais Hotel Modern qui, devant un plateau miniature de tournage, refaisaient le film encore et encore.

À l’aide de trois caméras, ils reproduisent des scènes de La Grande Guerre. Au début, une carte de monde pour montrer les différents élémenmts qui ont déclenché cet événement tragique. Un zoom sur la carte, pour montrer un détail. Puis la caméra recule à nouveau: des armes se trouvent sur presque tous les pays. Ça y est, le monde est en guerre.

Toujours grâce à ces trois caméras, le public assiste avec émotion à autant de scènes quotidiennes et dramatiques que les artistes reproduisent sur leur décor miniature. À l’aide de petits soldats, de terre, de boue, de clous rouillés, d’ail, et de forts en carton. Le carbone glacé devient un brouillard opaque, un vaporisateur devient la pluie… Et on s’y croit. On se met à la place de ce soldat tué en plein besoin urgent, ou marchant dans la boue, se faisant attaquer ou surprendre par une bouteille de vin piégée. Car il y a l’image, mais aussi le son. Grâce à la narratrice d’abord, qui lit, pendant que guerre se passe, de vrais témoignages écrits par des soldats. Quant à Arthur Sauer, il accompagne d’une bande sonore les images créées. Des billes jouent la pluie, des sifflements deviennent chants d’oiseaux, des amplifications des explosions.

<>, confie une spectatrice. Ce spectacle, créé en 2001, a déjà fait plusieurs fois le tour du monde.

13-11-2014

C’est étonnant, séduisant, bouleversant, terrifiant. On n’ose dire, vu le sujet, que c’est beau. Mais ça l’est! Des marionnettistes qui s’agitent à faire vivre les indices de la mort, récitante et bruiteur à autrement donner corps à ceux décharnées qui s’étalent devant nous. Voici une «expérience» théâtrale qui, pur des tas de choses, nous restera. Ne serai-ce (et malgré) que c’est à partir de bouts de ficelles (brindilles, persil, poupées de sparadrap, terre et carton…) que se déroule sous nos yeux le film de La Grande Guerre, de cette der des ders qui n’était, sommes toute, que la première touchée par le raffinement du modernisme.

Ça commence par un exposé, cartographie déployée et événements relatés en une sinistre chronologie des pays que se déclarent la guerre, comme un jeu de dominos. Et nous plongeons dans l’horreur. La scène est, entière, théâtre d’opération. C’est à la Comédie et ce n’est pas une. C’est néanmoins mise en scène à tous les chapitres. Le bruiteur a sa munition de partitions. Les manipulateurs vont de stand en stand, caméra au poing. De la terre, des brosse qui peignent forêts, des arbres persils qui agonisent au lance-flammes… En direct, sur grand écran. Bombardements. La ville brûle-t-elle? Elle devient cendres. Tout se bricole sous nos yeux. Un coup de doigt et ce sont des vies qui tombent au champ d’horreur, poilus de plastoc que la vie retoque. Capharnaüm, néant, trou noir. Et toujours la bonne focale qui filme la miniature pour faire grand effet.

Gros plans de jambes boueuses qui marchent dans la merde: «Plus on meurt souvent, plus on vit intensément.» C’est une litanie de morts. Un bateau dans la torpeur, un sous-marin qui le torpille. Silence de l’amer… Camps de prisonniers, explosions, obus jusqu’à plus soif, fumées, odeurs qui se répandent. C’est un reportage live, comme un direct sur la gueule: ça frappe et on n’en ressort pas comme d’un autre spectacle. Ça n’a beau être que du jouet, de la marionnette, des soldats de tissus pour images chiffonnées, on n’a peut-être jamais été autant dans le vrai. C’est hallucinant! Criant. Pas de vérité, non, mais de La Vérité. Cet Hotel Modern de Rotterdam à qui l’on doit ce chef-d’oeuvre est plus qu’une grande compagnie.

date inconnu

Con una magnífica entrada, fruto de la intensa expectación despertada, se presentó en el Teatro Central de Sevilla la compañía holandesa Hotel Modern, que ofreció, en riguroso estreno en toda España, su espectáculo De Grote Oorlog (The Great War), que constituyó un memorable éxito y un orgullo para los programadores de esta sala de vanguardia sivillana, lo que supone una reconfortante exepción en el cutre panorama teatral sevillano de inquietudes reformistas.

El fascinante espectáculo al que nos referimos, creado, producido e interpretado por los artistas Herman Helle, Arlène Hoornweg, Pauline Kalker y Arthur Sauer que crearan la compañía Hotel Modern, en Holanda, en 1996, se basa en el llamado teatro de animación de objetos, que es una faceta del teatro de títeres, pues todo. Títere es, por definición, un objeto –antropomórfico o no – que es animado por la mano del hombre para expresar emociones y sentimientos emanados del arte del manipulador.

Pero el gran avance de estor originales creadores; hasta el punto de abrir una gran puerta a los títeres del futuro, consiste en grabar con cámaras de vídeo la manipulación de muñecos y maquetas, y proyectar tal trabajo, simultáneamente, en una gran pantalla, donde lo que ve el expectador, sorprentdido, es de una belleza ciertamente inenarrable, con contenído dramático indiscutible y con una comunicación efícacísima sobre la inhumana salvajada que es toda guerra.

Como el espectador de esta obra da un tiempo a los actores realizar su perfeccionista interpretación y el resultado de la misma en la pantalla, éste queda cautivado por la magia y rendido ante el arte incuestionable de los realizadores, que recibieron al final, una clamorosa ovación, tan dilatada como mercida.

26-05-2002

The Great War of 1914-18 gave rise to the soldier-poet driven by a quest to reveal the horror of war. This production by the Rotterdam-based Hotel Modern company recreates the terror and helplessness of men trapped in hell which Owen and Sassoon captured so powerfully at the time.

This animation film is a remarkable feat of ingenuity – every effect created live by a miniature puppet show played to camera and fed to a huge screen. The trenches are created in a tray of earth, the soldiers are tiny fabric puppets, the fires are blow-torch flames, but the skill of the three puppeteers and the brilliant sound effects of musician Arthur Sauer create a virtually perfect illusion.

Perhaps the real star of this production is the voice of the soldier. Diaries and letters from the trenches add poignancy to the scene of death, rats, mud and blood created by the magic hands of puppeteers Herman Helle, Pauline Kalker and Arlene Hoornweg. The science of micro-surgery has surely been cheated of men and women with such magic fingers. The trio display a unique sense of how humans walk, run and fall down dead.

The effect of this expert puppetry is to reveal how war is created by human hands but develops its own relentless momentum which leaves individuals completely helpless and vulnerable. It is a particularly apt time for the Hotel Modern to place us in the shoes of our ancester soldiers.

Though another conflict has begun to influence world history, we are just as much in danger as ever for forgetting what Remembrance Sunday is all about. If you want really to get an idea of the impact of The Great War on its combatants, you won’t do much better than watch this production.

09-11-2001

Once in a while you see something quite extraordinary in the theatre, and this was so with The Great War at the Everyman Theatre. This was a British premiere of the work, brought here by Rotterdam’s Hotel Modern, and it is to be hoped that they can return to Liverpool with their groundbreaking drama.

Letters and diaries of First World War soldiers are brought to life through live animation. As we listen to the thoughts and messages from these men, their stories are told .before us on screen. We see behind the drama of conflict and are reminded that war is about real lives. The futility and horror of fighting is powerfully expressed through puppetry and other art forms. The invention of this company is breathtaking as you watch the devastation of lives unfold before you.

No-one could fail to be moved by these stories of loss and tragedy, and The Great War is particularly pertinent in our world’s current trauma. This company show how deeply affecting theatre can be and the Everyman and Liverpool Playhouse are to be congratulated for their perception in bringing us such an astonishingly inventive and unbearably touching production. More please!

November 2001