When the Nazis invaded Holland in May of 1940, Pauline Kalker\u2019s grandfather, Joseph Emanuel, who was Jewish, went into hiding. He moved from house to house, evading the Nazis for several months. But soon he was caught. The Nazis tortured him for three days, hoping to get information about where other Jews were hiding, but he did not crack. \u201cThey broke his nose and some ribs, but he didn\u2019t say anything,\u201d Kalker said recently. The Nazis allowed him to recover in a hospital, though soon after he was healthy he was transported to Auschwitz. He died a month later, on Oct. 1, 1943.<\/p>\n
Kalker never met her grandfather, but said in a phone interview, \u201cI was curious about who my grandfather was. I wanted to be with him.\u201d To that end, she and her theater company, Hotel Modern, based in Holland, created the miniature theater show Kamp<\/em>, which opens at St. Ann\u2019s Warehouse, New York, this Wednesday night.<\/p>\n The show features a model of Auschwitz, complete with 3,500 finger-length inmates, and depicts the camp\u2019s routine, gruesome events \u2014 beatings, gassings, cremations and starvations. The Holocaust is \u201cso big,\u201d said Kalker, \u201cthat you can\u2019t tell the whole thing. But we felt that in miniature theater you could tell it on a much bigger scale.\u201d<\/p>\n For the show, originally created in 2005, Herman Helle, the visual artist in the company, hired 10 local Dutch artists to build a near-exact model of Auschwitz. Helle undertook an intense research campaign, which included a visit to the camp, a viewing of several documentaries, and the study of camp blueprints, including its gas showers and ovens.<\/p>\n \u201cSometimes it was strange,\u201d said Helle. \u201cAt a certain point, I was looking at the gas chambers [the Nazis built] and thought to myself, \u2018That\u2019s not the smartest way to build it.\u2019 Then I caught myself, and said, \u2018My God, I\u2019m improving the gas chambers in a way.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n During the show, which lasts just under an hour and plays through Sunday, several company actors film the action live. The footage is projected on a giant screen behind center stage, where the audience can see the actors moving the tiny figurines and filming. Though there is no dialogue and no real plot, the intricate documentation of how Auschwitz functioned, Kalker said, is drama enough. \u201cWe wanted to show the machine working,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s the dramatic thing \u2014 that it existed. People did this.\u201d<\/p>\n But does the sweeping diorama come at too steep a price? Are the victims again made anonymous? When asked this, Helle said he did not think so. The company debated whether to focus on a few characters with a more traditional storyline, but decided against it. The nature of toy theater, he said, seemed to make any specific characters appear contrived \u2014 too cute, even. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t sincere,\u201d he said. \u201cYou see a character being beaten to death by a bodyguard, and that\u2019s as close to an individual character as you get.\u201d Still, the individuality of the inmates was not lost: \u201cYou zoom onto the faces and you realize that it\u2019s about human beings,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n Since all 3,500 figures are created by hand \u2014 their bodies made from simple wire covered in striped fabric, their heads from hand-rolled bits of clay \u2014 each one appears unique when projected on screen. You notice that each face, even in its abstract form \u2014 two poked holes for eyes, a sliced line for the mouth \u2014 is actually quite different. \u201cPeople find it very real,\u201d Helle said.<\/p>\n Contemporary toy theater often plays in the surreal mode (you could imagine Tim Burton having a field day with it), so the realism of Kamp<\/em> was strangely refreshing, said Susan Feldman, the artistic director of St. Ann\u2019s Warehouse. \u201cI\u2019ve been there, to Auschwitz and Birkenau,\u201d Feldman said, adding how life-like Hotel Modern\u2019s production seemed. \u201cIn Kamp<\/em>, you see the daily life of what happened there, whereas a lot of the time [in theater based on Auschwitz] that\u2019s just background.\u201d<\/p>\n St. Ann\u2019s Warehouse has a long history of staging both miniature (or \u201ctoy\u201d) theater, as well as puppetry. \u201cIt\u2019s been part of [St. Ann\u2019s] DNA since the beginning,\u201d Feldman said. (While toy theater and puppet theater are different, both, in essence, use props as characters, and theater directors often bundle them on the same bill.) In 1980, the year the venue opened, Feldman invited the renowned puppet company Bread and Puppet to stage a work. Since then, as toy and puppet theater has become increasingly prominent (think \u201cAvenue Q\u201d and Basil Twist), she\u2019s added new companies to her roster almost every year.<\/p>\n Kamp<\/em> is in fact one of several miniature theater performances being staged in this year\u2019s ninth annual International Toy Theater Festival, which runs at St. Ann\u2019s through June 13. But Kalker said that she herself avoids the name \u201ctoy\u201d. To her, it diminishes the seriousness of her work. \u201cWe never use that word,\u201d she said. \u201cWe find that the power of using models is that you can do really big themes.\u201d<\/p>\n Kamp<\/em> is not Hotel Modern\u2019s only miniature work either. The company, founded by Kalker and Arlene Hoornweg, both actresses, in 1997, made its first miniature show in 1999. After creating several avant-garde plays, the addition of Helle to the company inspired them to try something even more radical. Helle had a side career making models for prominent architects, including Rem Koolhaas, and proposed a show based on the workings of a modern-day city. City Now<\/em> was the result, and since then, they\u2019ve made four other miniature-style shows, including Kamp<\/em>.<\/p>\n The novelty and intricacy of their miniature work has made Hotel Modern wildly popular. But Kamp<\/em> was the first show to deal with such a charged subject, and occasionally audiences have not been pleased. Helle recalled a performance in Germany not long ago, in which a Q&A was held with the directors after the show. \u201cOne person got up and said angrily, \u2018It\u2019s a banalization of the Holocaust. It\u2019s kitsch.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n But Helle said that most of the audience seemed to disagree, finding the show deeply compelling. He reasons now that the intense negative reaction \u2014 which he\u2019s only experienced in Germany \u2014 probably had a lot to do with that fact. \u201cIt\u2019s still a very difficult subject to discuss there,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n There have been other memorable reactions, too. Kalker remembered the first time her own father and aunt saw Kamp<\/em>, in 2005. As children, both also went into hiding when the Nazis invaded Holland, but were separated from each other and their father, Joseph Emanuel, during the war years. Neither went to a concentration camp, only finding out about their father\u2019s death after the war was over.<\/p>\n Kalker recalled seeing tears come down her father and aunt\u2019s faces as the show came to a close. \u201cMy father and his sister,\u201d Kalker said, \u201chad never really grieved together after their father died. They did not talk about it when they grew up, and they could never give him a proper funeral either.\u201d For them, she thought, this must have been something quite like one.<\/p>\n 01-06-2010<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Though there is no dialogue and no real plot, the intricate documentation of how Auschwitz functioned, Pauline Kalker said, is drama enough. \u201cWe wanted to show the machine working,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s the dramatic thing \u2014 that it existed. People did this.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-press"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hotelmodern.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hotelmodern.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hotelmodern.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hotelmodern.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hotelmodern.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=381"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/hotelmodern.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2578,"href":"https:\/\/hotelmodern.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381\/revisions\/2578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hotelmodern.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hotelmodern.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hotelmodern.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}