This performance is as unique as it is universal

The Rotterdam-based theatre group Hotel Modern has been working away at a unique concept for around ten years. With the help of ingenious miniature sets and finger-sized cameras, they produce video images that they project live on stage. The audience sees both the process of creation and the final result.

There are no limits to the animated world they evoke: subjects range from erotic abandon to the inhumanity of Auschwitz; all painstakingly and lovingly made by hand and brought to life. In the new performance Shrimp Tales this technique reaches new heights. The complex manoeuvrings around the miniature set, including a live soundtrack maker who accompanies the projected images, have achieved such a powerful sense of rhythm and conviction that a truly unified whole comes into being.

It was also an inspired and brilliant idea to use shrimps to represent humanity in all its complexity. The creatures are so photogenic that one is immediately drawn into the stories: from the hysteria of a boxing match to the stillness of a rainy day on a campsite; from the first cuneiform script to the landing on the moon. The shrimps live through it all and mirror human life back at us, drenched as it is in delusion and loneliness. This eternal theme of human impotence is expressed marvellously at the end of the play by the winged shrimps that return to a room full of incubators, where the newborn baby shrimps hanker for their goal in life. This performance is as unique as it is universal.

11-02-2009