Hotel Modern theatre company as created its own, unique theatrical language with performances such as City Now, The Great War and Lear’s Eye. The premiere of their eighth production, The Man with Five Fingers, takes place this month. In addition to acting and mime, ‘live animations’ play an important role in the performances of this Rotterdam-based company. Everyday objects are given a new countenance and projected lifesize, causing astonishment and hilarity. In this way actors and theatre makers Pauline Kalker and Arlène Hoornweg, and visual artist Herman Helle create an entirely personal and unique surreal world.

Black revue
These elements are once again in evidence in the black revue The Man with Five Fingers. Following their adaptation of Shakespeare’s King lear in 2003, they wrote a number of stories connected only by the common theme of death. Arlène Hoornweg:”It was quite a struggle to make Shakespeare our own – and that’s the reason we started working with our own imagination again.” Pauline Kalker:”Originally there was no theme, we just wanted to be able to go in any direction we wanted to. At quite an early stage in the process we asked the American playwright Tod Davies to work on our ideas. It was only then that we realised death played an important role in all the stories. It’s become a sort of rollercoaster of extremes: extremely tragic, extremely hilarious, extremely bizarre, and so on.

Twin towers
One of the stories Kalker tells in The Man with Five Fingers is the authentic account of her grandfather who died in Auschwitz and her grandmother who made a spectacular escape from the same camp at the same time. Hoornweg:”Just as a story it is very beautiful. A family broken apart, and the various paths we then follow, in an almost documentary fashion.” Kalker:”In a way I finally get to meet my grandfather by performing this.” Another story is based on a newspaper article describing the death of a woman sunbathing on a packed beach. Het body is only discovered when the beach empties as evening approaches. Hoornweg:”It’s so tragic and so beautiful at the same time: among all that life and the hustle and bustle of the beach there’s a dead person just lying there.” The events of 9/11 also get their turn in the spotlight. Kalker:”When Herman saw those images he immediately thought ‘I could make a beautiful immitation of that’. You could call this an occupational disability. In the animation he observes the drama from the perspective of both the terrorists in the cockpit and the people in the Twin Towers.”

Dadaist
Composer and Rotterdammer Arthur Sauer has worked for Hotel Modern before. In The Man with Five Fingers he is present on stage throughout, providing live music and sound effects. Sauer:”What appeals to me about Hotel Modern is the combination of hi-tech and lo-tech and the group’s Dadaist bent. The same elements are present in my music too. Kalker:”We are very playful but also very intense when it comes to the emotions we want to evoke. That’s how the audience is supposed to experience it, and humour can be a way to achieve that. Arthur’s not afraid of looking into the abyss. That’s way we like to work with him.”

October 2004

Using cardboard scale models, self-made scenery and live animated puppet videos, Hotel Modern onze again tells a great and important story about the fragility of humankind. A surrealist fantasy about an erotically charged meeting between a woman and a unicorn juxtaposes an authentic wartime account of going into hiding, recanted by the elderly father of one of the actresses. The cruel absurdity of death – shockingly illustrated with stiff, liveless puppets – reappears in a number of guises and culminates in an overwhelming model version of the Twin Towers catastrophe. The swinging, exploding planes in Johan Gimonprez’ video D.I.A.L. History now have some competition. Destruction triumphs here. One does not know whether to cry for so many wasted lives or applaud such an abundance of imaginative theatrical power.

25-9-2004

The animated peep-show box as theatrical art form: one of the things that Rotterdam’s Hotel Modern has mastered. And those deceptively simple homemade objects that expand into entire worlds in the dexterous hands of the performers are there again in Hotel Modern’s latest piece, The Man with Five Fingers.

It works like this (more or less): the stage is strewn with miniatures and scale models fashioned from all manner of materials: puppets, a car, parts of interiors, a miniature row of houses. Purposefully, the performers navigate their way through this highly fragile chaos, often equipped with a small camera to record and project it all – with perfect timing.

The tableaux, augmented by background sounds, appear on a video screen on the back wall. Minor incidents in the street, a deserted room with the tv still on, a day at the beach. In Snail Trails they depicted the distressing universe of a confused elderly woman, and in the much lauded The Great War they brought an entire battlefield to life. But The Man with Five Fingers is not limited to miniatures. Here too the actors occasionally step into the performance and thus the scene will transfer from the screen to the stage and vice versa. In this section, entitled ‘sudden death’, we follow the cameras to places where people died unexpectedly: the dead body in the bedroom, on the asphalt, at sea. Small, hushed moments of loneliness and futility.

Music and sound effects play important roles in the stories, and for these the nucleus of Hotel Modern (actresses Pauline Kalker and Arlène Hoornweg, and visual artist Herman Helle) often turns to composer/performer Arthur Sauer.

The most personal part of the perfomance concerns the persecution of the Jews. And here the members combine all their forces. The result is beautiful and subdued. But the subsequent portrayal of 9/11 is the most impressive as it evokes feelings of how it must have been in the Twin Towers – while it is plain for all to see that one of the towers is a pack of fruit juice.

05-10-2006

Hotel Modern summons up compelling worlds using found objects, puppets, toys and cardboard scale models. Loaves of bread become buses in a city of fridge boxes, shrimps ride around on toy scooters and sprigs of parsley transform into rustling forests. In plain view of the audience, the miniature locations are build on stage. Tiny cameras film the action and the resulting image is projected on a large screen.

This highly inventive Rotterdam-based company is led by actresses Arlène Hoornweg and Pauline Kalker, and the artist Herman Helle. One of the two women, obviously pregnant, twirls through the toy scenery, followed by a squirrel. And so begins The Man with Five Fingers. Despite the bizarre humour it is not a strong start. But suddenly the mood changes. What followes is heartrending.

One of the performers interviewed her father about his childhood years during the war, and his frail voice reaches our ears through the speakers. Although the boy who went into hiding survived and his mother escaped from the train to Camp Westerbork, the boy’s father did not return from the camps. This story of a Jewish family is accompanied by perfect images. Fearful puppets jump from burning trains, run through dark streets, conceal themselves in a hole. They seem to be made of clay, those hounded mini-people, and it is not just the matrials from which they are made that makes them seem so fragile: it is also their smallness in relatiuon to their surroundings.

Perhaps even more moving is the fragility of the clay figures in the closing scene. I will never forget the horror as the aeroplane in which they were sitting drilled its way into a skyscraper. It is as if the full magnitude of the Twin Tower disaster was revealed to me for the first time, filmed from within and the whole experience intensified by music.

That’s how terrifying toys can be.

30-11-2004

Death makes heroes, losers or terrorists of us. You can meet death watching tv, lying in bed, flying into a skyscraper or being overpowered by a unicorn. Hotel Modern’s The Man with Five Fingers is a vanitas performance, the theatrical counterpart to paintings featuring an extinguished candle, a sand glass or a skull that confront people with their own transitoriness. This group from Rotterdam successfully illuminate death in a variety of manifestations, realistic and dreamt of. Tiny cameras are used to film in scale-model stage sets, and the resulting images are displayed on a large screen at the rear of the stage. On stage, in front of the screen, the actors feverishly create the live animation films – sometimes taking part in them.

The performance is beautifully composed. After images of everyday death (the camera creeps into the radio and imagines the news) and other fatal incidents, the two pièces de résistance are an interview with Pauline Kalker’s father (a Jew who survived World War II) and a film of the Twin Towers catastrophe. Elsewhere an absurdist performance by Herman Helle with a dead fish provides some comic relief. Hotel Modern’s low tech puppet theatre is highly imaginative – sometimes terrifyingly so. Death is unique and mundane. Just like a man with five fingers.

24-10-2004