One must be a daredevil to filter such untouchable film classics as “East of Eden”, “Rebel Without a Cause” and “Giant” into a 1h30 performance. 
The American choreographer Miguel Gutierrez choked clearly on the idea of bringing elements of those three movies together. Together with Michelle Boulé (as James Dean) and Tarek Halaby he tries hard to give sense to his concept but the performance turns, despite some flares, after a while into an everlasting boredom. James Dean will stay an eternal myth while Gutierrez is in need of a Porche engine to get to higher speed. How much he wants to be he ain’t yet a rebel without a cause.
Boris Charmatz isn’t a rebel either but his reflection and theoretical approach on dance history and choreography results often into remarkable projects. His new work “Levée des conflits” is in all its simplicity difficult to describe. As a magician he just puts a spell on you. Twenty four dancers enter one by one the stage. Each dancer starts with the same movement which seems to be inspired by 
Gustave Caillebotte’s painting “Les raboteurs de parquet” or can as well be read as a cleaning mouvement in reference to dancers as domestic workers. The stage fills slowly up. Each dancer repeats, with some time shifts, the same movement patterns as set out by the first dancer. However it just seems so because while the work develops becomes it harder and harder to define the consecutive movements. After a while it gives the impression as if you are watching bouncing molecules through a microscope. Charmatz creates a incredible cosmos of elementary parts. The stage becomes one big dynamic field. It is a pleasure how he tricks the spectator through his conducted impression of freedom. A freedom that contains as well a back-side named individualism. Although the dancers are all together on stage and form a crowd seems each of them been trapped in an individual cocoon and moves everyone as good as on its own. “Levée les conflits” has the effect of a magnifying-glas. It brings fiction and reality together. What we see inside the theater documents the harsh reality from the outside but in the same time it gives an equal pleasure as looking to the painted realities in Breugel’s landscapes with folk scenes.
Chris Kondek has clearly a special fascination for how money makes the world go around. With his new production “Money – it came from space”, which premiered recently at HAU Berlin, he continues his personal investigation toward the money stream. This time he links his theory to outer space phenomenon. Post-nuclear and alien movies are the source of the analysis Christiane Kühl and Chris Kondek brought to stage. All starts by the ’58 cult 
flick “The Blob” and more specific by the “It eats you alive” slogan of the film. Kondek and Kühle see the slime of the blob and how it mutates its victim as the perfect metaphor for money. This leads them to the judgment : ALIENS=MONEY. The performance is set up as a lecture (alternating in German and American language) while two alianiting characters with identical blond wigs manipulate the technique or sing in gibberish. The work is constructed on recollected theories, historical qoutes (Marx as expected), well choosen film fragments and impresive, bizarre own filmrecordings. The performance base and original point of view could have lead to an interesting revelation. It might be that four performers were at the premiere not yet at ease with the material to make it appropriate. At this moment it falters still in a too patchy structure and hovers too much between engaging and sympathetic. “Money-it came from space” makes you now and than giggle, contains a pleasant mix between facts and contemplation and makes you believe that aliens are equal to money: it pops up out of nowhere, it spreads fast as a poison that mutates humans into something diabolic and vanishes in the same way it came.
VIENNALE – documentary
The VIENNALE offers each year as well a rich documentary film program. About 60 documentaries saw the screen during the festival. During my short visit I was only able to see a few of them. I missed again e.g. Michelangelo Frammarttino‘s praised “Le Quattro Volte”, Sharon Lockhart‘s “Double Tide”, the controversial Casey Affleck flick “I’m still here”, and the much talked about “El Sicario, Room 164” by Gianfranco Rosi.
I did see the Cinéma du Réel winner “48″ by the Portuguese Susana de Sousa Dias. The number in the title refers to the 48 years of Salazar’s dictatorship in Portugal and its colonies. The filmmaker didn’t dig into archival footage to talk about 
the horror of this period but choose a selection of anthropometric photographs taken by the much-feared PIDE (political police). In voice-over recall the formerly photographed their memories. The filmmaker doesn’t show us the way her subjects look today, but the way these political prisoners of the Portuguese imperial regime appeared at the moment of their detention. So in place of a face lined with its terrifying memory marks, there are photographs, floating up out of the darkness, staring back relentlessly, pouring words out of their asymmetries, reflecting on their time inside. “48″ is a minimalist treat in which history and memory gets treated in an innovating manner. To be short this is irrefutable cinema.
Memories of a complete other kind are told in Céline Danhier‘s “Blank City”. Together with some protagonists of that time she looks back to the vibrant and wild downtown community of the late 70′s/early 80′s. It is a pleasure to hear how artists as Jim Jarmush, John Lurie, Debbie Harry, Steve Buscemi and many others talk about how the abandoned and desolate lower east side became the fertile playground for artists, musicians and filmmakers. Danhier evokes meticulously the free spirited creativity and verve of that period through a effective mix of 
witnesses, original film fragments and -recordings. The players of that time were all young, poor and struggling. They all were clear-cut mavericks possessed by rebellion and nourished by an irresistible drift to express their anger and being in music, cinema and art. Their adrenaline leaded to No Wave Cinema (Jarmush, Seidelman, Poe a.o.), Cinema of Transgression (e.g. Nik Zed, Richard Kern) and memorable concerts at CBGB. Their no-nonsense way in tackling the arts and institutes might be a good lesson for every nowadays (aspiring) artist. Another New York gets shown in “Foreign Parts” directed by Verena Paravel and J.P. Snaidecki. They set down their tripod in Willets Point a hidden enclave in the shadow of the New York Met’s new stadium. Filled with scrapyards and auto salvage shops, lacking sidewalks or sewage lines, the area seems ripe for urban development. The film observes and captures the struggle of a contested “eminent domain” neighborhood before its disappearance under the capitalization of New York’s urban ecology. The way by which the film gives attention to the daily functioning of a societal substratum, and the keen manner by which its directors dissect a sharp world of indelible sights and sound makes of “Foreign Parts” and revealing eye-opener. This can’t be fully said of “Boxing Gym” by the eminent documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman. Over a period of time he observes a wide variety of people in the Autstin, Texas based Lord’s Gym. The film contains all the characteristics of a Wiseman film (un-staged, un-manipulated actions, true to the spirit) but unfortunately stays the filmmaker this time too much on the surface of the environment. Everyone in the boxing gym has an own reason for picking up boxing training. The space becomes in this sense an proverbial American melting pot. This could have lead to an interesting analysis of social stories and cultural backgrounds. Wiseman didn’t choose to go in these issues but preferred rather hold on a pure observational distance. “Boxing Gym” keeps up the attention but falls too often in repetition and misses somehow a propulsive dramatic structure to stay captivated. The contrary happened with Leandro Listori‘s images in “Los Jovenes Meurtos”. 
The first feature documentary of this young Argentinian filmmaker relates in many aspects to Susana de Sousa Dias’ film. The filmmaker got fascinated by the incomprehensible high suicide number in Las Heras, a small city in the south of Argentina. The film looks perceptively at the locations that were once full of life, paying meticulous attention to details and sounds, trying to seize a remaining presence. “Los Jovenes Meurtos” prompts viewers to reflect upon its many layers rather than make them weep by means of manipulated catharsis. Listori insightful, heartfelt documentary refuses to go for an exhaustive research of possible causes for the suicides. He also doesn’t draw a portrayal of the youngster’s lives or of what ailed them. In a minimalist style and with sparse words focuses the filmmaker on the teen’s absence and on the void left by their deaths, no less. This film announces a new and bright film director on the rise.
The close the festival I went to an 11 pm screening of “Leonard Cohen: Live at the Isle of Wight 1970″. On his request I would have loved to burn a match but I think I would get in problems with the fire security of the house. 
Murray Lerner made a perfect registration of his memorable concert and crosscuted, it not too much, with wittnesess of some musicians who where there. The film focusses most on the concert but doesn’t go aside the amazing charisma of this hypnotizing performer, which he is still today. My VIENNALE days gave me again cinematic pleasure and I hope to get back next year.
VIENNALE – fiction
It must be said that the VIENNALE (Vienna Film Festival) is a annual film treat. It is one of those rare festivals 
which favors quality above quantity. Each section (fiction, documentary, retrospectives) is well balanced while the serene atmosphere makes it a pleasure to attend the festival. It is remarkable to see filled houses at prime time as well as at the early and late screenings. The VIENNALE breathes the passion for film out and provides exquisite moments (mostly late at night in the unavoidable Badenschiff festival center) for formal and informal meetings between audience, filmmakers and professionals. This year they paid the festival a special hommage to Eric Rohmer, the oldest among the famous gang of five of the French Nouvelle Vague. In addition they dedicated a special program to the work of the Canadian guerrilla filmmaker Denis Côté, a central figure in the independent sceneof Quebec, and digged films up by cult director and absolute outsider to the American studio system Larry Cohen. During the four days I attended the festival I got most mesmerized by the films of two old masters. Raoul Ruiz‘s four and a half hour spellbinding “Mistérios de Lisboa”, based on the famous book by the Portuguese writer Camilo Castelo Branco, is a 19th-century costume drama which maps the criss-crossing trajectories of a group of characters linked to the destiny of the film’s protagonist, orphan Pedro da Silva. 
Ruiz’s images are never gratuitously beautiful. the director’s command of his opulent mise-en-scene keeps the viewer glued to the screen. “Mistérios de Lisboa” is a perfectly tuned and constantly surprising thriller of ever-shifting identities. Each character is revealed Russian doll style, their particular life stories brilliantly and almost imperceptibly bleeding into each other, and all figured in stunning compositions reminiscent of classical paintings. Ruiz’s film is an irrefutable tour de force and without doubt the cinematografic thrill of the year. Another Portuguese mistery is which special spritual magic and life blossems keeps on stimulating the imagination of the 102 year old Manuel de Oliveira. His new film “O estranho caso de Angélica” (The strange case of Angélica) is becharming. The story turns around a young photographer, Isaac, who gets obsessed by the beauty of his subject, Angélica, who died just 
a few days after her wedding. It’s said that de Oliveira kept this script longtime on a shelf and waited until now to translate it to film. There is a certain logic in it. By watching the film it becomes clear that the story is as a kind of personal testament. The young photographer is undoubtedly his alter ego who’s eager to register cultural history and popular tradition to preserve it from vanishing by multiple forms of contemporary polution. Both share as well a zealous desire for beauty. Every frame, zoom or movement in the film is carefully caried out. Every detail in the picture has its effectiveness while the dream sequence in which Isaac and Angélica float in the sky is a heaven-sent hommage to Jean Vigo and the expression of love for film. Calling it a testament film might be wrong as Manuel de Oliveira started meanwhile already a new project up.
LONDON calls – Dance
It has been ages since I attended the annual Dance Umbrella festival in London. Last weekend a gave it a shot. My girlfriend and I hitted for the Royal Opera House to get to know if the buzz around the Canadian choreographer/dancer Ros Warby is legimate. Betsy Gregory, artistic director of the festival, welcomed us and invited us immediate for a post performance drink. Next we bounced into the festivals founder and longtime artistic director Val Bourne. It’s always a great moment to meet Val andI must confess that after all those years it seems that she hasn’t changed a bit. Her British wit, her love for contemporary dance, the not-to-stop interest in young and inventive choreographers and her taste for some good wine still graces Val. But let’s return to the dance of the evening. “Monumental” was it called. In brief I like to describe the evening as an attemp to bare strip ballet or
more precize iconic symbols of classical ballet: the soldier and (one can already guess it) the swan. Warby endeavors, in Deborah Hay’s words, ‘to remain dis-attached from the recognition’ of any one moment or developing scenario whilst simultaneously remaining lightly curious. Honestly I was lightly curious about what people had to say about the performance after the curtain fell. Warby tried as soloist as much as possible to demolish the ballet ideal with a series of cut up ballet steps, stumbling set ups to a ballet phrases or poses reminisent to the military or even more to body building. On the back screen flickered found footage images of flying and diving birds up and off while Warby danced in front of it. How much the choreographer/dancer tried to find a balance within her choreographic intent she unfortunately rarely succeeded in grasping the viewer into her compositional perspective. It is a pity to see how the multi-layerd intention of the piece didn’t reach much further than a one-sided experience. For some it was original and daring but I left with a extreme dubious feeling. This was not the case with the amazing exhibition “Move. Choreographing you” at the Hayward Gallery. The main focus of the exhibition is on visual artists, dancers and 
choreographers who create sculptures and installations that directly affect the movements of the visitors, turning spectators into active participants and even dancers. Works by e.g. Lygia Clark, William Forsythe, Robert Morris, Simone Forti, Dan Graham, Franz West (with Ivo Dimchev handling his work on video) and most of all Mike Kelley‘s ‘Adaptation: Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and Manipulatory Responses’ were bait for adults and kids. The exhibition space became a real playground and made clear that the complexity of art and artistic thoughts doesn’t feed only a small group of people but can as well be widely experienced by non insiders or non connoisseurs. In order to this exhibition one can, of course, question the rights and wrongs of such a popularization of the arts but one can’t pass by the strenght of its curational intent and the, in addition to the installations, insightfull documented nine-zone ARCHIVE containing 147 films, 140 artists, 175 works, 20 scores and 13 photographs. You can still experience this exhibition at the Hayward Gallery until January 9. Afterward it will travel to Haus der Kunst in Munich (Feb. 11-May 22) and K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Dusseldorf (July 16-Sept. 25). Back to the theater with Jonathan Burrows and Chrysa Parkinson‘s “Dogheart” (co-produced and presented by the Kaaitheater, Brussels). It is a pleasure to so how these two amazing artists 
interact with each other. Burrows continues with “Dogheart” his research towards the musicality of words and how to combine it with dance and images. In his previous collaboration with the Portugese musician Matteo Fargion he paved the rules of his ungoing artistic quest. It must be said that “Dogheart” doesn’t add much to what they developed in their mutual work “Cheap Lecture&The Cow Piece” but it are the frolicky interaction between Burrows and Parkinson, the playfull duets and the well spirited text/solo parts that tills the performance up to something more than standard. However I couldn’t get rid of thinking about Kurt Schwitters during the performance but only he couldn’t dance (I think).
LONDON calls – FILM
The Southbank stays an attractive place to hang out on sunny afternoons. Tourist, skaters, families and art lovers flocked last weekend together on the Thames river bank to enjoy the fresh Fall air, to buy second hand books, to visit the Haywarth Gallery (which I did – see under London calls – exhibitions), the Royal Festival Hall or the BFI Southbank which houses the National Film Theater (NFT). The fine late summer weather didn’t keep, to my surprise, film minded London out of the NFT movie theaters. I tried two times, without result, to get a ticket for Daran Aronofsky’s BFI London Film Festival screening of “Black Swan”, his newest psychological thriller set in the world of the New York City Ballet. In a way no big deal as the film will for sure get a widespread commercial release. I had more luck with two somehow smaller film treats. Vietnam filmmaker Phan Dang Di impressed me with his first feature “Bi, Dung So!” (Don’t be afraid, Bi). His film is in some ways comparable with the unforgettable Edward Yang film “Yi Yi”. Through the eyes of the six-year-old Bi we witness familyhood, the sorrow, pain, anger and love of adult life. Using a child as a focus allows Phan to show the grow-up sexual issues with a certain innocence. The result is an impressive visual and thoughtful cinematic exploration of inchoate longing, the messy consequences of physical decline and encroaching death, and confirmation that sex and youthful exuberance spring eternal. No scant dialogues for Lemmy Kilmister. During a period of three years followed the American buddies Greg Olivier and Wes Orshoski the track of this 65 years old Motö
rhead institute. While watching the film it becomes clear that Lemmy is such a fascinating gift of a subject. He reflects on a life in rock ‘n roll, fueled by drugs, booze and women, with remarkable honesty and roguish humor. In spicy language he brings memories up about him as a Hendrix’s guitar roadie, about the competently energetic but relatively faceless British mid-’60s band, The Rockin’ Vickers, he was member of, about his Hawkwind time where everyone was on slow drugs while he was on speed. Lemmy is a real legend with rare twists. His bottles of Jack Daniels and Coke accompany him everywhere just as his slot machine while his house is extravagantly decorated with swastika symbols, nazi flags, daggers and more nazi WW1 relics. It’s really amazing how trouble free (to a certain extent) Lemmy unveils himself to the filmmakers (and the audience). The reason of it might be that he isn’t, in opposite to many lesser music greats, a money and glamor sucking star but just Lemmy: a man who loves to be on stage, to play the bass, taking speed, who adores The Beatles, Little Richard, Carl Perkins and one armed bandits, who has a strong fascination for WO1. At the same time he is a surprisingly warmhearted and sensitive man who wonders he’s still alive. Lemmy is an ace of spade and “Lemmy. The film” a real winner. That was it for the BFI London Film Festival but before leaving the NFT I couldn’t resist on stopping by the NFT film books and DVD store and added the Polish outstanding masterpiece “The Saragossa Manuscript” (Wojciech Has), Max Ophuls’ “Letter from an unknown women” and the Brazilian Rocha classic “Antonio das Mortes” to my private film collection.
Cis Bierinckx 27/10/2010
OPERA JAVA
“Opera Java” was one of the several films commissioned by Peter Sellars for Vienna’s ‘New Crowned Hope’ festival in celebration of the 250th anniversary of the birth of W.A. Mozart *. Garin Nugroho, a singular figure who kept Indonesian cinema going almost single-handed in its leanest decade, the 1990s, directed a sensationally beautiful ‘gamelan musical’ based on the single most famous episode from the ‘Ramayana’: “The abduction of Sinta”. While the old tale smoulders under the surface, the opera (film and theater version) provides a updated story of love and fidelity, passion and revenge.
The different ethnic cultures in Indonesia form an important source of inspiration for Garin Nugroho. After throughout research into their dance, music, rituals and visual arts in collaboration with distinguished artists he distils them into concepts, into forms, images and sounds. They form the framework in which he raises questions of conflicts between local and global themes, between cultural heritage and people themselves.
Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum approached Garin for a theater version of his idiosyncratic and critical acclaimed film. Adapting film to stage seems to be as problematic as moulding a book into film. Garin needed to strip down the multiplicity of his original film project to make it fit for theater. This means that he had to economize quit a bit. The live performance limitations forced him to focus more on the essence: the music, the songs and the dance. These musicians, dancers and singers were certainly convincing and performed with devotion. Garin’s ideological and ethnological concept, as well as his contemporary approach basically stands but it lacks the efficiency he was able to materialize through the multitude the cinematographic language provides . The theater version is sober. On stage it is as good as impossible to evoke the same suggestive strength the film offers. The movie is in all senses baroque and draws from its locations, surroundings and symbolism. “Opera Java”, the theater version, doesn’t miss its original intent but it lacks wonderment. But, it’s for sure an easier sell than the film. It’s an attractive, well produced and a dedicated performance which will therefore, without doubt, hit stages worldwide. When will we see your next film Mr. Nugroho?
* read: www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/review/3997/
Cis Bierinckx, Amsterdam 9/3/2010
Noorderzon stories-part 2-
Theaters are thankful shelters on rainy days. First on my program was “2 Dimensional Life of Her” by the young Australian Fleur Elise Noble (www.fleurelisenoble.com). She works with the mediums of drawing, animation, film, puppetry, projection, performance and paper to create works that are specifically focused on the performative possibilities of drawing and process. The performance she presented in Groningen includes it all. She turns the space into a kind of ‘wunderkammer’ in which animated puppets and cut-out images come to an own life. It would be a bit too much to place Fleur Elise Noble immediately in-between such animation film masters as Jan Svankmayer, the Quay Brothers or William Kentridge but she certainly has the knack and knows pretty well how to spellbind an audience with her weird and enigmatic role playing game between master en servant . Instead of a single screen she litters the room with white paper bits on which her images are projected. This makes it possible for the different characters to jump around in space. Noble syncs her projected images and sound in such a fascinating and ingenious manner that it becomes a magical trip. The enchantment unfortunately doesn’t hold yet until the end. The source of the problem may be that it’s a production meant for kids and it therefore couldn’t end up in darkness and destruction. The smoothing happy end epilogue is too much a weakening attachment by which even the kids lost their attention. Only at the bitter end when all the character wave goodbye they were again on the top of it. Waving farewell is something one should certainly not do with Fleur Elise Noble. Watch for sure her next step!
After the show I hurried to “Wasted”, an installation by Tomoko Mukaiyama who made worldwide name as an enormous gifted and acclaimed pianist. At first glance one is amazed by her fascinating organic installation of 12000 white silk dresses which form a constellation of passageways with in the heart the “Red Room”. In this room she exposes a series of top designed concert gowns covered in her own menstrual blood. Further up she installed a meditation room, including cozy pillows, to reflect about the experience and intent of her work. Walking through the silk dresses gives a floating feeling as being inside a womb. By the entrance female visitors receive a white silk dress as a token. Although they have to make the (in)formal agreement to wear it during ‘the time of the month’ and second, the women must elaborate on her experiences with their own body and femininity in a form of their own choosing. It’s a fact that female artists and feminist art are still too repressed within the art market and museums. Fights by Guerilla Girls of all kinds are needed and make sense in this world of male hegemony but such a work as “Wasted” plays too smart the intelligibly intention key and pleases too much the emotions to become a smack in the face artistic statement. Unfortunately it lacks the (female) awakening call where the work is aiming for.
Youthful and fresh is maybe the best way to describe Jecko Siompo‘s (jeckosdance.com) choreography “Terima Kost” (Exit Room). His work benefits from its rollercoaster effect, the well disciplined group choreographies and the high energetic young dancers. The essence of his choreographed story is the seductive game between girls and boys (in the piece literally chicks and roosters, sometimes monkeys or animals of other sorts). They run and jump with an amazing accuracy and speed in, out and through cut outs in the in many ways very efficient set. The blur between tradition, pop, street and youth culture is Jecko Siompo’s dance signature. “Termina Kost” is disarming. The whole performance bathes in a tickling liberating spirit. It unwraps a breathless happy-go-lucky and playful youthfulness. Siompo’s gender vision might be rather conservative and it all might look for some a bit too slick but he knows damned well how to put a spell on the audience. 2010 is for sure JeckoS Dance’s break through year with “Terima Kost” performances in Hamburg, Berlin, Groningen and Zurich. It is clear that the Indonesian choreographer and his troupe will return as they are clearly ready to hit long runs, most likely, on the London West Bank or Broadway stages.
This won’t be the case with Julie Atlas Muz and Friends (www.julieatlasmuz.com). “After Muz, everyone else in burlesque must go back to the dressing room and suck cock for tips. Sorry,” wrote the New York Press while the Gotham penned “She has the burlesque thing down to a science–simple but genius.”. Julie Atlas Muz, who appeared with some of her pals in the recent released French film “Tournee” and caused some naked butt scandal while walking the red carpet in Cannes, knows how to upgrade burlesque without explicit extravaganza. She sticks to the origins but adds some contemporary context to it. The ingredients aren’t however surprising: an mc who could be plucked away from a side show, a charming afro-american crooner, a dirty sex-driven male ape and enthralling strippers in all sizes. They share an amazing family feeling and go full on in their acts including male and female strip of all kinds including a singing vagina to a very critical and unforgettable patriotic act. Julie Atlas Muz tells with her show indirectly more about femininity, sexuality, gender and the freedom of the body than the one-thought stylized installation of Tomoko Mukaiyama. Her weapon is not a post-porn modern Annie Sprinkle rant but a well thought over liberating plea for joy, freedom and acceptance. She makes purists melt and even libertines shuffle on their chairs. Would be great to get her a ticket to Brussels (we’ll do our best).
With the Japanese theater company Niwagekidan Penino (www.niwagekidan.org) we return to a cabinet of curiosity. In “Frustrating Picture Book for Adults”, directed by Kuro Tanino, the audience enters in a bad dream. The absurdity, unexpected twists and weirdness of David Lynch or Croneberg fantasies aren’t far away in this absurd erotic tale. At the same time pulls the play as much from some typical contemporary Japanese phenomenon: the hunger for knowledge, manga, solitude, stress and anxiety. The two-part set and what happens in it is outstandingly astonishing. The upper level is a sized down living room with a tree trunk sticking through the floor and the ceiling. Two freakish people live in it. They spoon white fluid from the tree trunks, are permanent eating an unappetizing substance and mumble, grumble the whole time. In the lower level, which is revealed later on, a strapped student is laying under tree roots on the top of a miniature landscape. The story starts to be really grotesque and bizarre once he intrudes into the upper room. It would be too much to reveal all what happens after. Freud or Bruno Bettelheim would have had a pleasure analyzing this fairytale of the subconscious. “Frustrating Picture Book for Adults” is without doubt a theater gem. It might be hard to disentangle the dream but it is nothing more than a reverie, a fully enchanting and brain-teasing fantasy which takes the viewer, as by Lynch and Cronenberg, in a grip to its end. Their is no way out with their and Kuro Tanino’s thaumaturgy : you like it with fulfillment or you hate it with a passion.
Cis Bierinckx, Groningen 8/29/2010
Noorderzon stories-part 1-
Noorderzon celebrates this year the 20th edition of the annual festival. I must confess that I never before made it to Friesland. I heard however visual artists, from Beuys to Greenaway, raving about the famous ‘Dutch light’ over here but unfortunately it’s too rainy to experience this magic. A pity or maybe not as it motivates me to come back. Honestly it isn’t Friesland and Groningen nor the ‘Dutch light’ which made me take the car over here but the Noorderzon Festival. Its curator Mark Yeoman convinced me during the KunstenFestivaldesArts to get on the road to the high North of our neighbor country Holland. The festival is without doubt one of the annual events in Groningen. Thousands of people flock during the evening together in the Noorderplansoen park where performances and concert take place in different tents and on spread around stages. However it’s clear that people come every evening mainly to socialize, drink and eat food of all kinds. This years’ hit for kids (and adults) seemed to be spin sugar on a color flashing disco light stick. The park might clearly be the place to be but Noorderzon has more to offer. The main program spreads itself out throughout several locations within the city and provides a diversity of international performances from e.g. Pichet Klunchun, Toshiki Okada, Gisèle Vienne to Inne Goris‘ LOD&Beursschouwburg production “Muur”.
On my first festival day I choose for the new Edit Kaldor piece “C’est du Chinois”. Five Chinese actors, a real family, encourage the audience to learn with them some basic Mandarin Chinese in order to comprehend their story. They enter with oversized shopping bags stuffed with all kinds of objects from tofu, chocolate to beer cans and more. As in elementary school they show the objects, name it and ask the audience to participate by repeating the newly learned Chinese word. Throughout the piece one slowly gets to know as well the structure and walks of the family. The whole performance turns basically around communication and the problems one can encounter by not speaking the same language or by being an alien. Putting Chinese people on stage is too often good for laughs. Their gestures, their inviting smiles while they talk, their particular body movements and kind of naivité seduces an audience very easy. Certainly in pieces created by non-Asian artists as they look, even without wanting it, at them with an as good as unavoidable exotic gaze and filter their observations mostly into naive impressions. It got this season e.g. proved by Diederik Peeters and Hans Bryssinck when they suddenly brought out three Chinese actors in their latest production “Zanahoria”. “C’est du Chinois” is certainly an entertaining work but it flows too much on the same idea so that it ends up in the pitfall of ‘charming’ instead of “interesting”. My mind turned at the beginning of the piece to Zhang Yuan’s amazing and reflective documentary “Crazy English” in which masses gather on Chinese sport fields and public squares to learn English as they believe that it is necessary to speak English in relation to contribute to countries economical boom. “C’est du Chinois” could have been an ideal reversed version of it but it lacks angle, judgment and reflection whereupon it drifts shallowly to its end. Although by leaving the theater the real contemporary China pops up in a flash when the family sets up a small shop and tries to sell their own DVD language course so that one can still practice at home. Business as it ever was and by doing it they participate in their way on their own Chinese economical boom. “C’est du Chinois” proved to be crowd pleasing (the laughs and in between applause stated that -and I was at moments for sure amused to). It might be a perfect fit for a laid-back evening and no problem with that. However one can’t deny that it is layered too thin and keeps on floating too much on a same trick to catch the full attention until the end. Will be continued.
Cis Bierinckx, Groningen8/28/2010