‘The creativity here is wonderfully vintage Hotel Modern: cameras shoot over wondrous tableaux full of ants, mothers, cobwebs, forests and tree bark. A hospital has been made of sock baskets and drainers. Including wandering through corridors full of worrisomely squeaking snakes.’

interview with Arlène Hoornweg and Pauline Kalker of Hotel Modern

Rotterdam theatre collective Hotel Modern are currently touring the Netherlands with their new play The Passage (Dutch title: De Lange Gang), based on two personal stories by members of the group. The following is an interview with Arlène Hoornweg and Pauline Kalker, who, together with visual artist Herman Helle, have formed the artistic core of Hotel Modern since 1997.

Could you describe your style for people who have never seen anything by Hotel Modern?

Arlène: We often use scale models, puppets, film and music to bring our stories to the stage. These tools enable us to evoke entire worlds, and tell stories – some realistic, some fantastical – about life and death, war, and history. Puppetry draws on the power of the imagination. It’s got a magical quality. You can bring a puppet to life simply by moving it, and people believe in it. They go along with it in their imaginations and their minds fill in the blanks. And, perhaps strangely, this can make their experience even more intense.

Where do you get your inspiration for your plays?

Pauline: We’ve often drawn inspiration from our own lives for our work. We came to make The Great War in 2001, for example, because when [fellow member] Herman did his military service he was deeply shocked by what a kick he got out of firing a machine gun. And we made our 2005 play Kamp because my grandfather died at Auschwitz.

Arlène: One of the stories in our new play The Passage takes the form of fairy tale, but it’s actually about my sister. She had to have major surgery when she was just a little girl. When she came home after a long recovery, my mother was confronted by just how much her daughter had changed: there was some things she couldn’t do any more, and later my mother became isolated and really struggled. She found herself in a grieving process, trying to give a place to the loss of the ‘old version’ of her daughter, and having to accept that her daughter had become a different person.

By using puppets to tell the story of my sister in a fairy-tale format, I was able to make her feeling of dissociation – from herself and the world around her  – really tangible. You see the mother roaming around in a desolate landscape, and crawling through seemingly endless underground tunnels looking for her lost daughter. The beauty and power of the nature in this world symbolise her resilience and her unshakeable love for her daughter.

And Pauline, what’s the personal story you tell in The Passage?

‘I had an abortion when I was 21, and afterwards I found I was grieving. It was lonely and complex. Because I’d caused it myself, I felt I had no right to be sad. And it was difficult to share my grief because of course other people assumed I was relieved that I wasn’t pregnant any more. Some people said I shouldn’t have done it, and I felt guilty. And I felt ashamed. So it’s really difficult to share the sorrow around an abortion. And when, much later on in my life, I got pregnant, I had really big regrets for a little while.

That’s an intense personal story! And abortion is quite a controversial subject. How do you present it in the theatre?

The theatre is a place to share, and it can also be a place to break taboos. There are still lots of women who experience the grief surrounding abortion as a taboo. It was a really lonely time in my life. The media mostly focuses on the right to abortion, because unfortunately it’s not properly and safely established everywhere in the world. That’s a terrible thing and it deserves all the attention it gets, but we feel it’s also important to share what an emotional rollercoaster it can be and the grieving process that often follows an abortion. What I’m hoping is that people who’ve been affected in whatever way by the grief surrounding abortion feel bolstered by the play.

We’ve performed it several times already, and each time there will be people who come up to me afterwards and tell me they could identify with lots of it, and that they’re happy to have seen it.

‘Two clay dolls that have been meticulously designed, placed in beautiful small sets and moved with subtlety and precision, meanwhile effectively filmed and projected on a large screen.’