Hotel Modern

Hotel Modern

Small, but larger than life

Hotel Modern welds puppet theatre, animation, expressive art, performance, mime and Music together to form a single organic entity. The company believes that imagery can be directly confrontational and emotive. Although they are not afraid to use scripts, imagery is their chosen theatre language: puppets, objects, actors, sounds and music are used in a variety of combinations to create exuberant, grotesque or happy worlds. Hotel Modern’s productions cover a broad emotional spectrum: from tranquil and tragic to energetic and comic.

For the last few years, De grote oorlog/The great war en Kamp/Camp have formed the mainstay of Hotel Modern’s repertoire. Both are ‘live documentaries’. The first is a reconstruction of the First World War; the Western Front on a miniature scale, using sawdust, potting soil, rusty nails and parsley as trees. Rain emanates from a plant sprinkler, and bombs from a gas-jet. A friendly field gradually mutates into a poisonous wound of mud. Small, but at the same time larger than life. Camp is played in a stage-filling scale model of Auschwitz. Overcrowded barracks, a railway track, a gateway with the words ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’. With thousands of handmade puppets and actors moving across the set like giant war reporters, Hotel Modern attempts to imagine the unimaginable.