Twin Towers drama in a juice carton
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
