Ghost Writer and the Broken Hand Break

Beneath its seemingly playful abundance there is always a relentless inquiry at the heart of Miet Warlop’s endeavor. Brazen and unperturbed as the action in pieces like Mystery Magnet or Dragging the Bone may seem, Warlop and her performers are tangled up in lofty existential quests. They try to wrest themselves free from restrictions, and pursue and explore their individual autonomy. How is subjectivity formed? How does intuition fare versus rationality? Where and when does creativity originate? These are the questions that Warlop tries to answer head on, using the physical body as epistemological locus: how are we to know anything, if we aren’t able to experience it, to feel and process it firsthand?

The staged visual experiments of Warlop are less concerned with the timed display of rehearsed gestures, than they are impassioned celebrations of curiosity and risk-taking. Classical dualisms abound, the most fundamental one concerned with the opposition of order and chaos. Form is not a static given in this artist’s universe: nothing is fixed, everything is in flux. Warlop’s work is fat and ripe in its glorification of immediate experience, and it is here that its inescapable energy is generated. Warlop’s beliefs are not a priori: she hurls herself into hi-octane sensory encounters with the world, forcing off layers of rational logic until she is able to stir the primordial soup. Touch! Smell! Taste! Hear! Feel!

Ghost Writer and the Broken Hand Break, Miet Warlop’s roughly 40-minute long stage piece for three performers including Warlop herself, is a temporary culmination of sorts in her self-styled niche of hyperbolic performance pieces, that combine aesthetic overload, iconoclastic impulse, and ecstatic release. Arguably the most minimalist of her staged pieces thus far, Ghost Writer and the Broken Hand Break uses a technique associated with sufism, the dervish’ repetitive whirling, as theatrical structure for a three-performer choreography of whirling and musical performance. Where in earlier work scripted processes of entropy allowed the artist to explore the productive tension between creation and destruction, Ghost Writer keeps the chaos in check: it is exactly in the precarious balance between physical endurance and joint musical-performative execution where this work is generating its impact.

Warlop invites the audience to informally huddle around the performers’ circular perimeter, so as to be able to amplify the physical intensity that is a crucial aspect of this durational performance. The increasingly noticeable panting and sweating produced by the three whirling figures, who all engage in their straightforward gyrational task in different – personal - formal idioms (basic-angular, expressive-exalted, with light-footed elegance) emphasizes how spiritual release is counterpointed by the banal reality of the physical body. As is per usual in Warlop’s pieces, Ghost Writer and the Broken Hand Break slowly but surely unfolds towards a high point. The artist intuitively connects the traditional mystical connotation of the dervish’ whirling, which is aimed at spiritual transcendence, to another, more secular kind of climax, that of the experience of dance music.

The success of Ghost Writer turns out to be highly contingent with the performers’ ability to maintain their posture and balance while executing increasingly coordinated musical tasks. After a ten minute first act of ‘clean spinning’, focusing on an adjustment of the senses and finding a stable whirling rhythm, the three performers start to slowly form a musical ensemble. One starts to create rhythmic patterns by percussively tapping drum sensors attached to his body, while the other starts laying down lyrical rock guitar riffs on a Stratocaster offered to him and grabbed mid-whirl. Miet catches a cymbal. Hits it. First, slightly off-beat. (The whirling – it makes timing so hard!). Then, she hits it tighter. Songs start to form, one blending into the other, the trio winking at rock, hip hop (including take-aturn MC-ing), and electroclash in an omnivorous celebration of pure playfulness. Eventually, one of the voices shouts: one, two, three, four…Lights snap on, and suddenly the world stops turning. What remains are three stumbling figures, trying to fixate their gaze on the hands they hold outstretched in front of their eyes, for balance. The hands are painted red, yellow, and blue – the chromatic foundations of, here, now, everything.

Xander Karskens