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Expressing through movement

In the area of mime – also described as movement theatre or physical theatre – there are such talented theatre makers as Bambie, Boukje Schweigman, Jakop Ahlbom and Golden Palace. Many of them were taught at the special mime department of the Amsterdam High School of the Arts, which attracts students from far beyond the Dutch borders. Inspired by the mime corporel, developed by Etienne Decroux at the beginning of the twentieth century, this school builds on a strong mime curriculum, where the central idea of movement is keeping the body in balance. Students learn how to make theatre, but apart from that they focus on expressing themselves through movement. Performances are not made on the basis of repertoire, but come from actuality; what is occupying the performer here and now. Text is not necessary to get a message across or to evoke an atmosphere or a certain feeling, and if text is used, it is often developed ‘on the floor’, during the rehearsal process. The power of body language is used as a source of expression for performing. Unlike in dance, mime must communicate something;

there is no pure, aesthetic movement. A mime player’s aim is to touch people personally and directly.

Most contemporary mime groups established in the eighties (Nieuw West, Suver Nuver, De Daders) have their roots in the mime school, and many of them have been directly or indirectly influenced by the mime companies of the sixties and seventies – such as Waste of Time, BEWTH, Griftheater and Carrousel – from which the popular Carver split off in 1989. René van ’t Hof, Leny Breederveld and Beppie Melissen named their group after their first performance together, about Raymond Carver. Since then, they have been producing successful, original movement performances about daily life with a comic or tragi-comic character.

Jeannette van Steen, who worked with Bewth for several years, started her own company, De Groep van Steen, in 1994, and developed a kind of mime theatre that combines elements from the Japanese Noh theatre with Western movement theatre. At the moment, her company makes sober performances in museums or other architecturally interesting places. Writing on her website, Van Steen puts the basic idea of mime aptly: ‘I investigate the possibilities of pure movement as an independent means of expression, as well as those possibilities presented by the interaction of music, design and movement.’

Nieuw West, a company set up and led by Marien Jongewaard, started out around 1980 with confrontational, radical, raw performances that drew heavily on people’s stamina. Many people rejected Jongewaard’s theatrical views, but just as many loved the way he searched out the borders of theatrical experience, and the conflict between cruelty and beauty, chaos and emptiness, existential despair and shameless pleasure. Jongewaard makes use of existing texts, specially written by author Rob de Graaf. In the production Spartacus (2004), they appeared to investigate the mentality of ‘crime for crime’ and upcoming terrorism by showing a group of people becoming brainless fighting machines under the influence of a café boss, while a hard porno videotape was shown in the background.

One of the younger generation of mime companies, Bambie, invited Marien Jongewaard as a guest performer for their tenth performance, Bambie 10 (premiere December 2005), which was about cynicism. Bambie may be regarded as the younger brother of Nieuw West, although Jochem Stavenuiter and Paul van der Laan (the two Bambies) seem more sensitive, or less cruel. Their performances are rich in fantasy and are precisely choreographed. But their beautiful images are interrupted by explosive actions, their disarming and humorous scenes by cruel fights. Impulses and desires, dreams and frustrations are extremely magnified, until the figures on stage almost collapse under them. No wonder that this company chose to cooperate with Marien Jongewaard (among others) for this production.

The consciously naïve

Another young generation is that of what a journalist at NRC Handelsblad has labelled ‘the consciously naïve’ movement. They include Boukje Schweigman & designer Theun Mosk, Jetse Batelaan, Gienke Deuten & Bram de Goey, and Elien van den Hoek. The term ‘consciously naïve’ is a reference to the emphasis that these theatre-makers put on aesthetics and beauty, producing a show on the basis of imagination and a ‘consciously naïve’ fascination for the world. The makers treat the world as if opinions were not guided by societal, social, economic or political interpretations. For example, for one of her shows (Wervel/Whirl), Boukje Schweigman sat her audience in a ring and made them watch for a full hour as she spun faster and faster on her axis in increasingly wider circles, without even mentioning the topics that dominate the theatre elsewhere: the integration of ethnic minorities, the hardening of society, extremism, xenophobia, radicalism, terrorism, or even love, loneliness or death. It is up to the spectators to decide whether they want to take up the exciting challenge of these or any other topics that are introduced, and which they find themselves unable to set aside.

Jetse Batelaan created the production Broeders/Brothers, an almost silent fairytale with no beginning and no end, whereby each actor continually alternates between the role of ‘brother’ and ‘patient’. The patients can only move, act and exist thanks to the help of a ‘brother’. If the ‘brother’ lets go of his or her hand, the patient collapses. But there is no indication of the setting for this production; it could be a hospital, a hospice or even a metaphor for life itself (which we cannot live in isolation). So the show takes on a specific, personal meaning in the mind of each and every unsuspecting person who sees it.

Regular theatre and dance-makers are also often keen to allow their audiences to interpret what they see. Having said this, the makers’ own interpretation is almost always unavoidable and rarely without personal motivation. This is how the consciously naïve aim to differ; they consciously refrain from all forms of interpretation, perhaps because they are all too aware of the full extent of their personal influence. They know that when they tell a story from A to Z, every point of cohesion and even the chronology itself implicitly includes an interpretation of the world according to the maker. Their shows are shades of images and movement, in a seemingly random order, often moving in circles and a-linear lines.

Their shows have almost no text at all, using only the body in a specially designed space that does not exist in the real world. This might be mime at its purest – and perhaps, but this is tricky – this is the final point of the mime that was developed in the twenty years before: this is what the mime has strived for all the time but that only now has become possible. A landmark in mime.

Theatre outside

Movement aspects are also important in site-specific theatre, though it involves more than just that. The genre, started some forty years ago as a means of bringing theatre to a non-elite audience often without money, now fulfils a less idealistic but still optimistic goal: instead of adapting to the limitations of theatres, theatre makers can choose their own place, rebuild it into a theatre and make something that can only exist in that particular place. Whether that place is a forest, tent, passengers’ terminal or supermarket, it will be exclusive. The audience feels a certain solidarity with the performers, as they share in the secret of performing in a non-theatrical place. There are theatre groups who only make theatre for special locations. But many regular groups also create site-specific performances, alongside their work in theatres, especially in the summertime.

Whereas until a few years ago, the month of June marked the end of the theatre season, last year’s summer invitations were posted to theatre lovers from May to September. A lot of summer festivals invite theatre and dance groups to perform in open spaces, in tents, on the beach and in the woods.

During the Festival Oerol (started in 1982), almost every corner of the island Terschelling is used for plays, dance performances, research presentations or music concerts. A visit to Terschelling’s Oerol means, apart from waiting in long queues and bumping into other visitors, experiencing theatre in the open air, where the environment and the weather contribute to the performance. You can watch a dance performance in stormy rain on the coast at night, and the next morning watch a theatre piece shielding yourself from the burning sun with a newspaper. A few years ago, Oerol even started a workshop for site-specific theatre, where the genre can be researched and developed by young inspired artists. Making theatre for a special location is more than just taking account of the technical needs, the audibility and the weather; it is also important that the environment fits the play and vice versa.

But Oerol is not the only open-air festival; there are many more, some of which also take place in the cities. De Karavaan travels through the province of Noord-Holland and shows its performances on streets and squares. Festival Over ‘t IJ in Amsterdam, Festival aan de Werf in Utrecht and Theaterfestival Boulevard in the south of Holland put emphasis on young site-specific talents. And De Parade descends for a few weeks each year on the cities of Rotterdam, Utrecht, The Hague and Amsterdam, with a lot of special site-specific and regular theatre in tents or in the mud. And the audience loves it; the highest theatre attendance figures are always during the festival season in the summer months.

The best-known theatre groups who only make theatre on special locations are The Lunatics and Vis à Vis. The latter makes large-scale outdoor summer performances where image and action play a larger role than dialogues and plot. In visual comedy, the performers show ‘the fight of modern man with the stubborn reality of everyday life’. In Picnic (2000), the group gave the audience the opportunity to see what happened both on and off stage. On stage, a couple decides to go for a picnic and meets a wounded passer-by. Instead of helping him, they take his luggage, with all the consequences. Behind the scenes, the technicians and actors struggle hard to create a cinematic illusion on stage. Apparently simple effects turn out to be extremely complicated to bring about. The eight hundred visitors saw half of the show backstage, and half of the show on stage – a sublime and humorous invention.

Warner van Wely left his former company Dogtroep in 1990 and started a new company three years later: Warner & Consorten. It’s a group of sculptors, musicians, dancers and actors who all prefer unusual locations, indoors and outdoors. In the summer of 2000 they performed Clock-work/Guerilla, a double production for public spaces. In Clockwork they explored the boundary

between man and machine. The scenery was formed by a living, twenty-metre-long installation, where the actors endlessly repeated everyday actions (making bread, feeding the fish, washing socks). Man seemed to be transformed into machine.

There is a new generation of theatre makers who don’t choose to work only in theatres, on location, for young or adult audiences. They do it all, which leads to beautiful performances. Dries Verhoevens recent production U bevindt zich hier/You are here was a hit at the summer festivals of 2007. People checked in in a hotel-like setting, were guided to their rooms and cordially requested to lie down on their beds. What started as a one-on-one performance changed all of a sudden into a one-on-one-on-all performance when the mirror ceiling started to rise, offering the spectator a peak in every other room.

Lotte van den Berg offers the spectators a complete new view on what seemed normal up until the moment they stepped into her performance. In Gerucht/Rumour (spring 2007) she blended the street and city traffic into the performance; the audience watched it through a huge window in their temporary wooden home. The dividing line between what was real and staged was so thin that the audience was kept in constant doubt.

Many more groups, like The Lunatics, Théâtre Espace or Space, explore what drama can do to everyday locations. And it can do a lot, as most of their audience members will agree! It should come as no surprise that the work of these companies is also extremely popular at festivals outside the Netherlands, as the visual language of this theatre genre can be understood all the way from Holland to Japan.

Lonneke Kok