‘Inexplicable and fascinating, it eludes time and space.’

 

Tuur Devens in Theaterkrant.nl, 3 April 2017

Rhythmic jamming with juggling balls and drums 

Years ago, I would often write enthusiastically about the symbiosis between physical circus arts and theatre in ‘cirque nouveau’, circus theatre. However in recent years, this circus theatre has often been reduced to merely showcasing and showing off with acrobatic and other circus arts. However clever these may be, I want more than that alone. I want at least some kind of layering, a theatrically imaginative layer beneath the tricks on the trapeze, on the floor, in the ropes, on balancing devices, and with or without balls. Circus theatre – naturally with the exception of people like Ronaldo and Alexander Vantourhoudt – has become too much about a circus of human tricks in a slick wrapper. For me, this is entertainment that is rather too tasteful and too one-dimensional.

I want imperfection, vulnerability, existence, life, imagination… I want to be touched and moved. But how can I find these things in a circus these days? In Flanders alone, there are now around a hundred circus companies! Just try picking out a few choice saplings from this thicket. I am guided by chance, and from time to time I come across something beautiful. One such moment occurred at the recent international Krokusfestival in Hasselt, a festival which focuses on theatre and dance for children and young people. Post uit Hessdalen were due to put on a short performance there. A few months previously, their film Poolnacht had moved me. So anything was possible.

It proved to be a surprising moment! PAKMAN is one of the few performances in which juggling with balls has enthused me. I’m not interested in whether someone can chuck five or six or seven balls in the air and then catch them again. I want to be moved by the juggler’s vulnerability in his relationship to the balls, to the space, the surroundings, the imagination, the content, the atmosphere… And PAKMAN moved me.

Post uit Hessdalen does full justice to its name. This small, youthful company is named after the village of Hessdalen in Norway, where a mysterious light spectacle has been witnessed. Inexplicable and fascinating, it eludes time and space. The film-maker and circus artist Stijn Grupping and theatre-maker and scriptwriter Ine Van Baelen also seem to want to create this kind of impact with their hybrid performances, in which all kinds of artistic disciplines are mixed. They might achieve this using film and video, or by weaving circus tricks into other artistic disciplines.

Poolnacht (2015) was an intriguing video in which virtual landscapes merged into images of nature. People try to escape the pressure of urbanisation, and in the North seek out a transcendence to point the way to a pure future, but whether or not this can be found in the play of the (northern) light and the dark silhouettes of trees and black water remains to be seen, particularly once they return.

PAKMAN is a symbiotic game of juggling and music. Using bounce balls, Stijn Grupping enters into a rhythmic dialogue with the drums, which are played by Frederik Meulyzer. But there is more. The group of spectators is packed together in the covered back of a lorry. The pakman is not a virtual figure, but a sombre man in brown workers’ clothing behind a glass counter, engaged in stamping large boxes. These then glide across the conveyor belt towards the audience, who can use them as seats. A postal counter where you can collect packages? This is no longer of our time, as now you can order everything online, only for it to be delivered to your door a few hours later.

The man stamps and at fixed times takes short breaks to drink and eat, consuming coffee from a thermos flask and sandwiches from a lunchbox. He gets bored, discovers some balls, starts throwing them around, and the game has begun. His loneliness is given a rhythm, his work tempo increases, and a second person starts drumming on the kitchen equipment. The two jam in a musical game in which it is no longer clear whether the bouncing balls or the hand beats of the drummer are determining the rhythm. You try to follow the balls in their trajectory through the space behind the glass, as they fly from the table to the floor, before bouncing against the wall via a plank and returning to the man.

Technically intriguing, but also visually artistic, this is a fascinating game played out in space and time. The soaring balls create geometric lines and the old-fashioned postal counter is transformed into a space in which sound rhythms create a magical interplay of lines. A world that appears virtual but in fact is not. This short but powerful performance lasts for just 25 minutes: a stunning example of imaginative circus music-theatre. The age guideline for the performance is 5+. This is something that people of all ages can enjoy. As you step out of the lorry, you leave a separate world, and find yourself needing to watch your step as you climb down. Luckily a helping hand offers you the necessary support for your return to the real world.

‘The thrilling grey darkness and a narrator’s voice lull you into a timeless trance.’

 

Liv Laveyne in Circusmagazine#48: 15 September 2016

I want to break free from the wheel of the economy

At first sight, these would seem to be two incompatible worlds: the world of the circus artist and that of the factory worker. And yet the performance PAKMAN unites the two in a small lorry.

It’s over twenty degrees outside when we are called inside the cargo space of a lorry parked in the shadow of the church in Ghent’s Macharius neighbourhood. The daily grind enacted within, where Pakman (Stijn Grupping) stamps and heaps up cardboard boxes to the rhythm of the conveyor belt and the mercilessly ticking clock, is as grey as the idyllic MiramirO festival outside, where people are happily whiling away their summer holidays. Separated from the audience by a plexiglass wall, this tableaux becomes even sadder. Just as you would stare at a chimpanzee in the zoo, here you stare at a person in his (self-imposed?) prison: the treadmill of the economy. But tragedy aside, this is also a human being; one who succeeds in using his imagination to lend colour to the ordinary, and in channelling his resilience into transforming tempo into rhythm. Arbeit macht nicht frei, but our playfulness does set us free. Homo est homo ludens.

Imagination works

Initially Pakman slavishly follows the tempo of the machine, before breaking loose and creating his own rhythm against the steel walls of his ‘cell’ using juggling balls. When a second figure (Frederik Meulyzer) starts drumming from behind the boxes, a rhythmic duet unfolds which at times is more like a duel. Is it a dialogue, a fight between colleagues, or an alter ego? Between a human being and a machine? With time or with himself? And who is leading whom in this merry-go-round?

PAKMAN puts a whole new spin on the ‘industrial music’ genre. As in the famous factory scene in Dancer in the Dark, in which Björk harnesses music to sing herself free from the machines, Tinguely’s iron musical sculptures, or the audio-visual road trip Clangdelum Cinematographica, in which the sound artist Hans Beckers explores the musicality of our surroundings, PAKMAN also couples and uncouples the pulse of the machine to the vibe of bouncing balls and drums.

Post uit Hessdalen

PAKMAN is the latest creation by Post uit Hessdalen, the company headed up by the theatre-maker Ine Van Baelen and film-maker and circus artist Stijn Grupping (co-founder of Ell Circo d’ell Fuego). Alluding to Hessdalen, a valley in Norway in which an inexplicable light phenomenon has been playing out in the sky for years, their style is equally inexplicable. From their debut The Smallest Family Circus in the World, in which they used video projection to transcend the physical boundaries of the circus body in time and space, to the documentary Poolnacht, in which the shimmering grey darkness and a narrator’s voice bring you into a timeless trance, or now this PAKMAN: radically different in form and discipline, in content they share a single concern: as human beings, how do we deal with the phenomenon of time? As a virtual, natural or economic factor. As a seducer, enemy or playmate? Tick, tock.

Address unknown

Does this substantive quest make PAKMAN an incredibly powerful circus performance? No. You sense that the roar of repetition is too loud for this to be the case. Instead, this is the perfect, made-to-measure box with a label designed for every broad festival context. Nevertheless, Post uit Hessdalen is naturally skilled at being that elusive light from which its name is derived. The fact that this duo carries out in-depth research over a longer period of time than a single performance, coupled with their wide range of forms and disciplines, is precisely what makes them so interesting. This is particularly pertinent in the circus genre, where performances tend to suffer from short-term thinking along the lines of ‘we’ve come up with a cool idea’. Above all, let’s hope that Post uit Hessdalen never find their destination and that they keep on searching. Time is on their side.

‘In Polar Night, Post uit Hessdalen turns boredom into something delicious’

 

Els Van Steenberghe in Knack Focus, 12 January 2016

Last year, five artist friends fled the rat race in which Westerners appear to be collectively imprisoned and spent several weeks in a no man’s land near Greenland. During their stay they kept a diary. From these diary entries they then distilled the intriguing production Polar Night.

The play = Polar Night

Company = Post uit Hessdalen and Muziektheater Transparant

In a single sentence = Polar Night is a gem by a bunch of ‘inventors’ who balance on the edges of performance, theatre and visual art. In this creation, which literally lights up the darkness, they provide the perfect answer to what is going wrong in our society, where everything always has to be ‘faster and more and bigger’.

Highlight = When the set starts to move and the dead landscape turns out to be anything but deathly.

Score = ***

Quotes:

‘There is always wind on this island, but now it is excessive and untamed. To describe nature is to portray a temperamental character. Why should a person be able to be stubborn, but not a mountain?

+

‘Being here is an exercise in concentrating on the present. Managing to stare straight ahead for five minutes without thinking of the next five. ‘When the wind of the soul dies down’ is how Nietzsche described boredom. Waiting, just waiting, that is rewarded by the revelation of true time, not that of the clock, but that which is experienced internally.’

+

‘No, memories are not carved in stone, they are repeatedly rewritten. How often have I come to realise this?’

***

When were you last bored? It seems like an odd question, doesn’t it? Once in a while educationalists come up with such advice as ‘being bored is good for our children’. But it is also good for grown-up children who these days – after the well-earned Christmas rest – race faster than ever through their days so as to keep appointments, make new appointments, hold meetings, get their work back on schedule, think up new strategies and so on.

‘And what about if we just got out of the rat race?’, which is what the young theatre-makers of Post uit Hessdalen thought. This company was founded in 2014 by the circus performer and film-maker Stijn Grupping and theatre-maker and scenarist Ine Van Baelen. For Polar Night, they also called in Liesbet Grupping, Frederik Meulyzer and Lucas Van Haesbroeck. Together they left for the Norwegian island of Sørøya, which never sees full daylight and where the snowfall means that you sometimes have the feeling of walking through clouds. Or through the hereafter. All five kept a diary. From these diaries they distilled a monologue that was recorded by Geert van Rampelberg in his warm and rather lonely-sounding voice. Without appearing live in the performance, Van Rampelberg plays a man who enjoys solitude but also suffers from it. And this is exactly what the five friends experienced during their stay. For a while it was unpleasant, but they soon started to fill the gap with structure, with daily tasks, with a daily walk in the footsteps they themselves had made the day before. They needed to introduce a finiteness to the almost complete endlessness of the landscape.

The marvellous thing about this production is that you live through what they experienced. After being warmly received, you are led into a completely darkened room. You sit very close to a projection screen that covers the whole stage. Then what seems to be a black and white documentary about the landscape of Sørøya begins. It takes a while before you realise that the landscape really does look black and white during the polar night. Van Rampelberg’s voice directs and stimulates your thoughts while you wander through the landscape with your eyes. The slowness and the lack of any sense of time become part of the performance. You walk around in a landscape that seems almost like a moonscape, where the light comes from the snow and not from the sun. What is fascinating is that the film is a lot more than just a film. There is a proper stage set hidden behind the projection screen. A set that only becomes visible after a time. It is only then that you notice the dimensions in the image, just as in the real landscape. It’s true that the makers approach it too cautiously. The evolution of the set does not sufficiently respond to the evolution in the superb text. The desire to give us the same experience is somewhat of a hindrance to their imagination as designers and image-makers.

Polar Night is a gem by a bunch of ‘inventors’ who balance on the edges of performance, theatre and visual art. Sometimes they tumble into the abyss of insufficient expression, but in this production they offer the perfect answer to our society’s addiction to more, bigger and faster. Here, everything goes slowly and is on a grand scale. Polar Night halts in and reflects on silence, slowness and the grandeur of nature. And the peace it brings. And it is by no means boring. On the contrary. By staring, you discover nuances, details and beauty that you did not realise were there. And this can be transposed to society: less time running after what is to come and live a little less in the future, and gaze a little more at the things and people around us. This would seem to be a fine, illuminating resolution for 2016, born during this dark Polar Night.

‘Norway, Point Zero.’

 

Interview by Geert Van der Speeten in De Standaard, 24 December 2015

[…] ‘Norway has it’, says theatre maker and scenarist Ine Van Baelen. ‘Places where you question rational perception. Impressive but inhospitable landscapes. Extremes of light and dark. Truly a country to withdraw to.’ And that’s what the five artists of Polar Night did. They ordered three weeks of food supplies, organized transport and – armed with cameras and audio equipment – had themselves dropped on Sørøya, an island far past the Arctic Circle. Here, the polar night erases the difference between day and night.

[…] The residence on Sørøya was set up as a research into our experience of time. Van Baelen: ‘We all have busy lives and we’re obsessed with time and efficiency. We long for quietude. But when the moment’s there, we do not succeed in slowing down. We were wondering: what if you could completely liberate yourself from time? No daylight, no clock, no reliable frame of reference.’

It’s been tried before through scientific experiments that locked guinea pigs in a cave. The outcome was the inner clock; in these conditions, we apparently switch automatically to a 24 – or 25 – hour pattern. Van Baelen: ‘We also encountered that. After just a few days, an intense mechanism became activated, a need for a daily routine. Of course boredom and the absolute idleness struck soon enough. But instead of letting go, our lives became more structured. Our obsession with time grew even stronger.’

Also the experience of nature was overwhelming on Sørøya. The five felt like they were slowly becoming part of the winter landscape. Van Baelen: ‘We couldn’t go far out, and certainly not on our own. You are not familiar with the weather, and it changes rapidly that far north. The experience was especially disorienting, as if your own perception is mocking you. The continuous dark forces you to focus. You see spots. In a snow white landscape without sun, and hence without shadow, you lose perception as well, you can no longer see depth. The structure of the landscape disappears and you end up with simplified images. Reality therefore has something of a fictitious landscape.’

The struggle with the elements resulted in Polar Night, a performance that will premiere aptly on the festival Wintervuur. It combines the overwhelming intensity of experiencing nature, with the grip we are trying to find during these disorienting observations. Van Baelen: ‘We reconstructed our experience from that desolate winter in the middle of the city. Can the copy evoke the same sensation as the original? The base for the work are our own photo – and film recordings, and we applied long exposure time to be able to record in the dark.’ […]