The unextraordinary life of the camp

Kamp is quite fascinating. The sprawling camp in about 1:25 scale is full of thousands of inmates in drab porisoner garb. There are all the emblematic, eerily familiar ingredients that we have come to dread: the barbed wire, bunkhouses, railway siding, gas chambers and incinerators. Most of the performance and all of the dialogue is in our brains. We know the story. Few people are innocent of that knowledge, so there is no need for dialogue or anything more than mute observation.

On stage, three performers from Rotterdam’s Hotel Modern company move around and use miniature camera technology to capture close-up the daily life of the camp. A lot of scenes are played out to a soundtrack that starts with night sounds, then martial music, then many sound effects. The detail in puppets and models becomes plain. We see row upon row of new arrivals, dressed in their Sabbath best and with their suitcases, marched off to the building where first we see shoes, then clothes, then naked bodies.

Around this central tragedy, the unextraordinary life of the camp plays on, from dawn to night, asking us to accept the tragedy and replace it with the drwan-out misery of those who live on. It becomes, in truth, a bit dreary. It’s like a diorama you might see in a museum, but a moving diorama in more ways than one. The camera captures scenes, vignettes and short stories, such as a morning gallows execution, and puts them up on a screen behind the model. That is something new in theatre: to watch a cluster of three real poeple gather among the model bunkhouses to enact lives long forgotten that will never be memorialised and write them large on the screen.

14-03-2013