AFTER ALL SPRINGVILLE — Miet Warlop

Misery is the river of the world, Everybody row!
Tom Waits
Engels excerpt uit ene tekst van Robrecht Vanderbeeken, 2010 (vertaling tbc)

In Springville the decor comes to life in and around a cardboard house of a man who is everyone and nobody. Right in front of the audience a succession of strange creatures meet: a set table with women’s legs and stiletto heels instead of table legs, a walking and ‘jumping’ electrical cabinet, a mysterious, rattling and sniffing moving box, a modal jogger but with a very long body and a total size of nearly two and a half meters. One by one they go on, after which it’s the turn of the house’s downfall. On the basis of this contemporary performance, we analyze in what follows how artists can teach us something about today’s catastrophic thinking.

The Wonderful Warlop World: Slapstick with the chaotic order of things.

Miet Warlop studied 3D/multimedia at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) of the Hogeschool Gent and won in 2003 with her graduation project Huilend Hert/Aangeoten Wild Theater aan Zee in Ostend. Afterwards she made Sportband/Trained Sounds. She worked for two years at the studio project De Bank van theaterhuis Victoria in Ghent, where she realized Grote Hoop/Berg: a series of city performances and two solos. With Springville, Warlop not only omits the ambiguity in the titles of her work for a moment, she also makes the transition from performance to a theatre performance of which she is both director and actress in a company of six, with two technicians.

Starting from the title one might think that Warlop wants to refer to the film Dogville by Lars von Trier because it brings a play in the film medium of film, while Springville actually brings a silent film in the medium of theatre. Despite this, Warlop, with the title Springville, mainly wants to refer to a place that is everywhere and nowhere, like there are countless anonymous villages with the same name in the U.S., or like the now infamous Springfield from The Simpsons. Or closer to home: just like every Flemish village has or had its caf. De Sportvriend or Het Hoekske. With this Warlop emphasizes not only that the catastrophe makes no distinction in race, gender or origin and can therefore strike anywhere, but also that fate from an individual point of view does not necessarily have to be a world disaster. The universal is in the concrete; As we all know, the small, private sorrow, the personal gravitation breakdown, is often a true disaster that can turn our entire world upside down.

With Springville, Warlop is actually doing in the theatre what an earthquake does to a city, or a hurricane with a park: the order of things is totally mixed up and chaos is replaced by a new and meaningful regularity. During a studio conversation Warlop showed a book with photographs that testified of the passage of catastrophes; A car stands upright, with the front facing the sky, against the side of a house. A burnt-out banquet hall was decorated with bizarre, lush patterns on the initially white, boring walls by the flushing water that drained away. A chair that stood neatly in the garden now stands on the roof. The blossoming tree from the front garden is in the bedroom. A flooded holiday home was transformed by the sudden freezing cold into a snow-white palace of snow, rhyme and ornate ice cones, etc. In this rearrangement Warlop finds playful poetry and a transversal beauty. This aesthetic also serves as a starting point for an experiment with materials, objects and her own structures. During the creation process she is not guided by big ideas or overarching schemes. On the contrary: from one thing to the next, with trail and error she and others work together step by step to create something that is worth watching and keeping watching. This way she arrives at sketches that attract the full attention but for which you don’t have a ready-made label. They are now like that but they could just as well have been completely different. In Springville these sketches were brought together in a certain order and within the time frame of a performance they form an imaginative story.

What is striking from the beginning of the performance, and what also makes it special, is the systematic reversal in which the props seem to come to life and play the piece, while the actors take on the role of extras or set pieces. When the audience enters, it sees only a large cardboard house at the centre of the scene. The performance begins without the room light being extinguished. A long plume of plastic smoke appears from the chimney of the house. Suddenly, a man in a suit throws a grey garbage bag through the window with the necessary grace. A little later, a brown packaging box walks on two legs from behind the house and sniffs it into that garbage bag with a round paper mailer tube that is pushed between the folds of the closure of the box. The first character seems to have appeared only now; an indefinable and intangible thing, possibly a metaphor for vermin, or a homeless, or a forgotten storage box full of neglected things and memories, the excluded waste, the revolt of the packaging, and at the same time nothing of this. The box’ is more like a figure from a comic strip or an animation film than a character from a piece. But just like the other figures in the performance, it has its own sensitivities and character. The ‘man’ returns a number of times and thus keeps the story between the figures going. Suddenly, he walks through the improvised door of the house, positions himself in front of the audience and ostentatiously starts reading a newspaper. When the newspaper opens, of which we only get to see the back and on which nothing is printed, the tune of the once very popular TV series The A Team starts playing. The sigh of the media for sensation and spectacle is so aptly portrayed without words. When the box looks up the man with the newspaper, and the life of every day calls him to order, he knows no answer at all. With socially adapted aggression, to put it that way, the cause of the unrest is efficiently removed. The next time the man storms outside, he collects the figures for a group photo; the tried and tested social ritual that serves as a substitute for a sense of belonging or as a surrogate for comfort and love. Moreover, the camera is mounted on a glitzy, remotely-piloted off-road vehicle, so that it represents, among other things, one of those latest gadgets that always perform as well as neutral subject of conversation at family parties. The last time the man comes up, it is to manually saw the jogging giant that just dived through the window of the house in two. The result is a sujet barré, but literally. The other, one might think, has to be castrated because he threatens to confront us with a way of being that is not ours, and with which we consequently know no advice and have no place at all. Or worse: the other person must be destroyed because otherwise, sooner or later, he could steal our pleasure.

After all the figures have undergone their personal catastrophe (the electrical cabinet continues to fire; the table set finally kneels and crashes; the box smokes, falls over and crashes; half the bottom of the jogger runs to crash against the wall) and when the man hangs out of the window for death, the global catastrophe looms from all sides at the same time. A smoldering cloud sizzles under the house like a poisonous lava stream. From behind the house a gigantic air pocket is blown up, which lifts up the house like a plastic tsunami and sets it blank. Then the house simply falls apart into two pieces, leaving only a fragile polystyrene inside in the same shape. In the first performance at Buda Kortrijk this black fairy tale ends with the melting of this inside like an iceberg but in an ammonia bath. Because of the strict safety standards of our theatre houses, Warlop had to provide an alternative for this in later revivals; the house implodes as it does with the last destructive shock of an atomic bomb blast. This stunt sometimes turned out to be a bit of a nuisance during the later revivals, so that the end was somewhat lacking in its appearance as the end. The question can be asked, however, whether a catastrophe can fail and thus whether the failure of the representation of the final catastrophe is not just a good end?

Theatre as a performance of fragile attractions

There is a lot to say about Warlop’s artistic method. For example, just as today’s post-cinema often returns to the time before the classical narrative film, back to the amazement for the new of early cinema, so Warlop’s wordless movement theatre also returns somewhat to the time before the text theatre. Not to the spectacle of variety, but to the world of silent film. Warlop remediates the experiment with effects and tricks of early cinema, in which showing the “filmed” was more important than telling a story. There she shows things that act directly on the viewer, make them amaze, without the detour of text. Springville clearly has something filmic and is related to the slapstick à la Buster Keaton: physical sketches with a wink, a game of action and reaction in which one looks for the irony and emotion contained in the collision, the falling and falling over, the striking quarrel in which cakes are thrown and the pursuit, on foot, on horseback or by car.

Warlop does not bring a dramatic and noisy stage, but tries to inspire us for the logic that is contained in the course of simple things, such as the toppling over of a pile of buckets. Through an improper use of things, independently of the concrete plans we have with them and regardless of their usual functions, their usefulness and the accompanying instructions for use, Warlop can surprise with a frivolous play of forms. The figures she created are not readable prayer cards but autonomous appearances that captivate us about what they do, rather than what they could mean. Despite his hilarious moments, Springville is not a comedy either. In fact, it tells a very serious story. It presents a successive death struggle that the audience should watch out for completely. Yet this does not result in horror: as with slapstick, very bad things happen but nobody dies. ‘Pain that does not matter’, as Warlop likes to call it. And as in cartoons, we see how banal things are transformed into something impossible; they are lifted out of their handles and then just there to be, hang or stand. It is this force that effortlessly holds the viewer’s attention, lifts us up, and at times makes us wonder what we are actually doing all these godly days or sometimes make us so busy.

The fascination of the slapstick in Springville is made possible by at least three special strategies. The first is fictionalization. Because Warlop mainly does not want to bring any actual representation, the staged game is disconnected from our daily reality. The fiction that replaces it, however, offers an ideal diversion to feed back to everyday life from a sufficient distance. Along the way, expectation patterns are pierced or evidences are put in jeopardy in a way that the viewer can hardly miss. As with animated films, fiction is sometimes the quickest way to say something about the real world.

Secondly, humor. Warlop confronts the catastrophe without raised fingers, world-enhancing preaching or complaining. Irony and even hauberk are given the forefront so that the performance finds direct access to its audience. As with stand-up, humor is an instrument to avoid censorship and self-censorship, to say wrong things correctly, and especially to put seriousness into perspective and disarm drama. Finally, the distinct performance quality. Warlop manages to hold the attention of her audience because the staged sketches clearly arise here and now and can actually go wrong at any moment. When, for example, the covered table in front of the audience slowly sinks through its legs, the audience mainly looks at the reactions of the other audience; Who laughs? Who will collect the coffee bag? And does anyone dare to save the uncorked bottle of champagne? The fragile performance character of the sketches, which for example evoke the same tension as a magic trick or a circus act, is magnified in Springville by the absence of the classical theatre context: there are no curtains to hide something behind, the light stays on in the hall, there is no music that plays the emotions, no beautifying lighting effects, etc. The sketches are naked in a bare room. The only effect that can be seen comes from the figures themselves. Or the reacting audience.

The specific live aspect of Springville, which Warlop has a good command of, as a performance artist, actually puts the performance in a whole new perspective. Rather than wanting to capture the momentary or the passing of time, for example, or confront the viewer with an angular presence, she plays with the risk that the sketches may also go wrong. By drawing attention to the stunt-content, Warlop manages to avoid the “look-at-me” attitude that is unfortunately common to many performance artists. The performance remains exciting, partly because it is not covered. The outcome is uncertain, the actions fragile. And it is precisely in this fragility that Springville finds a critical, even a political potential. After all, this light but solid performance does not want to make or explain anything but simply to show something, without moralism or historical ballast. It shows the fragility of everyday figures and contrasts it with the violence of destruction. Springville is not so much political because, as a fleeting work of art, it cannot be sold and therefore cannot be recuperated by the art market, but because it puts the uncertainty of our lives on stage and focuses its nullity in the light of the apocalyptic.

Springville is therefore not only extremely relevant to today’s catastrophe because it puts a multi-part image of the catastrophe on stage, but especially to the way in which this is done. With the precarious nature of the attractions in the performance that this performance essentially still is, Warlop indirectly shows her audience two crucial things at the same time. On the one hand she emphasizes the vulnerability and instability of our contemporary culture. And that this in itself is actually very expensive. Culture is a temporary staging, a construction that inevitably falls short and can be wiped out in this way. Away. This insight thwarts contemporary self-satisfaction, the misplaced consumption ideology that everything is ultimately renewable and replaceable, and the denial logic that a lot is currently going wrong and that we urgently need to do something about it before it is really too late. On the other hand, Springville’s sketches emphasize the artificial character of our global culture: fake, cardboard and plastic. Which also means that things should not necessarily be as they are. We can change them if we want to.

Misery is the river of the world, Everybody row!
Tom Waits
Engels excerpt uit ene tekst van Robrecht Vanderbeeken, 2010 (vertaling tbc)

In Springville the decor comes to life in and around a cardboard house of a man who is everyone and nobody. Right in front of the audience a succession of strange creatures meet: a set table with women’s legs and stiletto heels instead of table legs, a walking and ‘jumping’ electrical cabinet, a mysterious, rattling and sniffing moving box, a modal jogger but with a very long body and a total size of nearly two and a half meters. One by one they go on, after which it’s the turn of the house’s downfall. On the basis of this contemporary performance, we analyze in what follows how artists can teach us something about today’s catastrophic thinking.

The Wonderful Warlop World: Slapstick with the chaotic order of things.

Miet Warlop studied 3D/multimedia at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) of the Hogeschool Gent and won in 2003 with her graduation project Huilend Hert/Aangeoten Wild Theater aan Zee in Ostend. Afterwards she made Sportband/Trained Sounds. She worked for two years at the studio project De Bank van theaterhuis Victoria in Ghent, where she realized Grote Hoop/Berg: a series of city performances and two solos. With Springville, Warlop not only omits the ambiguity in the titles of her work for a moment, she also makes the transition from performance to a theatre performance of which she is both director and actress in a company of six, with two technicians.

Starting from the title one might think that Warlop wants to refer to the film Dogville by Lars von Trier because it brings a play in the film medium of film, while Springville actually brings a silent film in the medium of theatre. Despite this, Warlop, with the title Springville, mainly wants to refer to a place that is everywhere and nowhere, like there are countless anonymous villages with the same name in the U.S., or like the now infamous Springfield from The Simpsons. Or closer to home: just like every Flemish village has or had its caf. De Sportvriend or Het Hoekske. With this Warlop emphasizes not only that the catastrophe makes no distinction in race, gender or origin and can therefore strike anywhere, but also that fate from an individual point of view does not necessarily have to be a world disaster. The universal is in the concrete; As we all know, the small, private sorrow, the personal gravitation breakdown, is often a true disaster that can turn our entire world upside down.

With Springville, Warlop is actually doing in the theatre what an earthquake does to a city, or a hurricane with a park: the order of things is totally mixed up and chaos is replaced by a new and meaningful regularity. During a studio conversation Warlop showed a book with photographs that testified of the passage of catastrophes; A car stands upright, with the front facing the sky, against the side of a house. A burnt-out banquet hall was decorated with bizarre, lush patterns on the initially white, boring walls by the flushing water that drained away. A chair that stood neatly in the garden now stands on the roof. The blossoming tree from the front garden is in the bedroom. A flooded holiday home was transformed by the sudden freezing cold into a snow-white palace of snow, rhyme and ornate ice cones, etc. In this rearrangement Warlop finds playful poetry and a transversal beauty. This aesthetic also serves as a starting point for an experiment with materials, objects and her own structures. During the creation process she is not guided by big ideas or overarching schemes. On the contrary: from one thing to the next, with trail and error she and others work together step by step to create something that is worth watching and keeping watching. This way she arrives at sketches that attract the full attention but for which you don’t have a ready-made label. They are now like that but they could just as well have been completely different. In Springville these sketches were brought together in a certain order and within the time frame of a performance they form an imaginative story.

What is striking from the beginning of the performance, and what also makes it special, is the systematic reversal in which the props seem to come to life and play the piece, while the actors take on the role of extras or set pieces. When the audience enters, it sees only a large cardboard house at the centre of the scene. The performance begins without the room light being extinguished. A long plume of plastic smoke appears from the chimney of the house. Suddenly, a man in a suit throws a grey garbage bag through the window with the necessary grace. A little later, a brown packaging box walks on two legs from behind the house and sniffs it into that garbage bag with a round paper mailer tube that is pushed between the folds of the closure of the box. The first character seems to have appeared only now; an indefinable and intangible thing, possibly a metaphor for vermin, or a homeless, or a forgotten storage box full of neglected things and memories, the excluded waste, the revolt of the packaging, and at the same time nothing of this. The box’ is more like a figure from a comic strip or an animation film than a character from a piece. But just like the other figures in the performance, it has its own sensitivities and character. The ‘man’ returns a number of times and thus keeps the story between the figures going. Suddenly, he walks through the improvised door of the house, positions himself in front of the audience and ostentatiously starts reading a newspaper. When the newspaper opens, of which we only get to see the back and on which nothing is printed, the tune of the once very popular TV series The A Team starts playing. The sigh of the media for sensation and spectacle is so aptly portrayed without words. When the box looks up the man with the newspaper, and the life of every day calls him to order, he knows no answer at all. With socially adapted aggression, to put it that way, the cause of the unrest is efficiently removed. The next time the man storms outside, he collects the figures for a group photo; the tried and tested social ritual that serves as a substitute for a sense of belonging or as a surrogate for comfort and love. Moreover, the camera is mounted on a glitzy, remotely-piloted off-road vehicle, so that it represents, among other things, one of those latest gadgets that always perform as well as neutral subject of conversation at family parties. The last time the man comes up, it is to manually saw the jogging giant that just dived through the window of the house in two. The result is a sujet barré, but literally. The other, one might think, has to be castrated because he threatens to confront us with a way of being that is not ours, and with which we consequently know no advice and have no place at all. Or worse: the other person must be destroyed because otherwise, sooner or later, he could steal our pleasure.

After all the figures have undergone their personal catastrophe (the electrical cabinet continues to fire; the table set finally kneels and crashes; the box smokes, falls over and crashes; half the bottom of the jogger runs to crash against the wall) and when the man hangs out of the window for death, the global catastrophe looms from all sides at the same time. A smoldering cloud sizzles under the house like a poisonous lava stream. From behind the house a gigantic air pocket is blown up, which lifts up the house like a plastic tsunami and sets it blank. Then the house simply falls apart into two pieces, leaving only a fragile polystyrene inside in the same shape. In the first performance at Buda Kortrijk this black fairy tale ends with the melting of this inside like an iceberg but in an ammonia bath. Because of the strict safety standards of our theatre houses, Warlop had to provide an alternative for this in later revivals; the house implodes as it does with the last destructive shock of an atomic bomb blast. This stunt sometimes turned out to be a bit of a nuisance during the later revivals, so that the end was somewhat lacking in its appearance as the end. The question can be asked, however, whether a catastrophe can fail and thus whether the failure of the representation of the final catastrophe is not just a good end?

Theatre as a performance of fragile attraction

There is a lot to say about Warlop’s artistic method. For example, just as today’s post-cinema often returns to the time before the classical narrative film, back to the amazement for the new of early cinema, so Warlop’s wordless movement theatre also returns somewhat to the time before the text theatre. Not to the spectacle of variety, but to the world of silent film. Warlop remediates the experiment with effects and tricks of early cinema, in which showing the “filmed” was more important than telling a story. There she shows things that act directly on the viewer, make them amaze, without the detour of text. Springville clearly has something filmic and is related to the slapstick à la Buster Keaton: physical sketches with a wink, a game of action and reaction in which one looks for the irony and emotion contained in the collision, the falling and falling over, the striking quarrel in which cakes are thrown and the pursuit, on foot, on horseback or by car.

Warlop does not bring a dramatic and noisy stage, but tries to inspire us for the logic that is contained in the course of simple things, such as the toppling over of a pile of buckets. Through an improper use of things, independently of the concrete plans we have with them and regardless of their usual functions, their usefulness and the accompanying instructions for use, Warlop can surprise with a frivolous play of forms. The figures she created are not readable prayer cards but autonomous appearances that captivate us about what they do, rather than what they could mean. Despite his hilarious moments, Springville is not a comedy either. In fact, it tells a very serious story. It presents a successive death struggle that the audience should watch out for completely. Yet this does not result in horror: as with slapstick, very bad things happen but nobody dies. ‘Pain that does not matter’, as Warlop likes to call it. And as in cartoons, we see how banal things are transformed into something impossible; they are lifted out of their handles and then just there to be, hang or stand. It is this force that effortlessly holds the viewer’s attention, lifts us up, and at times makes us wonder what we are actually doing all these godly days or sometimes make us so busy.

The fascination of the slapstick in Springville is made possible by at least three special strategies. The first is fictionalization. Because Warlop mainly does not want to bring any actual representation, the staged game is disconnected from our daily reality. The fiction that replaces it, however, offers an ideal diversion to feed back to everyday life from a sufficient distance. Along the way, expectation patterns are pierced or evidences are put in jeopardy in a way that the viewer can hardly miss. As with animated films, fiction is sometimes the quickest way to say something about the real world.

Secondly, humor. Warlop confronts the catastrophe without raised fingers, world-enhancing preaching or complaining. Irony and even hauberk are given the forefront so that the performance finds direct access to its audience. As with stand-up, humor is an instrument to avoid censorship and self-censorship, to say wrong things correctly, and especially to put seriousness into perspective and disarm drama. Finally, the distinct performance quality. Warlop manages to hold the attention of her audience because the staged sketches clearly arise here and now and can actually go wrong at any moment. When, for example, the covered table in front of the audience slowly sinks through its legs, the audience mainly looks at the reactions of the other audience; Who laughs? Who will collect the coffee bag? And does anyone dare to save the uncorked bottle of champagne? The fragile performance character of the sketches, which for example evoke the same tension as a magic trick or a circus act, is magnified in Springville by the absence of the classical theatre context: there are no curtains to hide something behind, the light stays on in the hall, there is no music that plays the emotions, no beautifying lighting effects, etc. The sketches are naked in a bare room. The only effect that can be seen comes from the figures themselves. Or the reacting audience.

The specific live aspect of Springville, which Warlop has a good command of, as a performance artist, actually puts the performance in a whole new perspective. Rather than wanting to capture the momentary or the passing of time, for example, or confront the viewer with an angular presence, she plays with the risk that the sketches may also go wrong. By drawing attention to the stunt-content, Warlop manages to avoid the “look-at-me” attitude that is unfortunately common to many performance artists. The performance remains exciting, partly because it is not covered. The outcome is uncertain, the actions fragile. And it is precisely in this fragility that Springville finds a critical, even a political potential. After all, this light but solid performance does not want to make or explain anything but simply to show something, without moralism or historical ballast. It shows the fragility of everyday figures and contrasts it with the violence of destruction. Springville is not so much political because, as a fleeting work of art, it cannot be sold and therefore cannot be recuperated by the art market, but because it puts the uncertainty of our lives on stage and focuses its nullity in the light of the apocalyptic.

Springville is therefore not only extremely relevant to today’s catastrophe because it puts a multi-part image of the catastrophe on stage, but especially to the way in which this is done. With the precarious nature of the attractions in the performance that this performance essentially still is, Warlop indirectly shows her audience two crucial things at the same time. On the one hand she emphasizes the vulnerability and instability of our contemporary culture. And that this in itself is actually very expensive. Culture is a temporary staging, a construction that inevitably falls short and can be wiped out in this way. Away. This insight thwarts contemporary self-satisfaction, the misplaced consumption ideology that everything is ultimately renewable and replaceable, and the denial logic that a lot is currently going wrong and that we urgently need to do something about it before it is really too late. On the other hand, Springville’s sketches emphasize the artificial character of our global culture: fake, cardboard and plastic. Which also means that things should not necessarily be as they are. We can change them if we want to.