"You are my sunshine," sings a woman very softly. Meanwhile, the audience sits in pitch darkness. We are trapped. Banished to a shelter that, it seems, suddenly has no exit.
It is a real bomb shelter in which theatre-maker Davy Pieters holds her performance Helium. Shelter 313 at airbase Soesterberg once served as a refuge for staff. We entered it through a narrow passage and now look down from a high stand.
There, a light flickers on. The face of a man on a bed becomes visible. More and more lights come on and more and more beds come into view, beds in which people sleep. A woman, the singer, wakes up. She walks over to someone else's bed and shakes at them. The creature doesn't make a sound. Is it sometimes a dead person?
And are those other figures lying on their sides, in reality fabric dolls, also down the pipe yet?
If that is true, then the two women and the one man leaving their beds are the only survivors of a group that has survived an earlier disaster. The three are in bad shape. They are almost out of food, as is water.
At least, that is what Davy Pieters suggests. Precise words are not involved. But gestures, performed slowly, gestures that leave something to the imagination. In this way, the audience creates its own story. Pieters gives us a helping hand by not avoiding strong emotions. There is crying, screaming and, by way of hopeful counterpoint, frenzied dancing. These bursts of emotion are not cheap. They come at unexpected moments and it scares you every time, yes, even that silly dancing.
The biggest shock, oddly enough, is a moment that could have been wonderful, for the bunker dwellers. A wall of the shelter splits open and daylight streams in. But the woman who ventures outside cannot enjoy her freedom. She flees, again, this time not to the shelter but to the Soesterberg woods.
Davy Pieters won a top prize at this year's Maastricht Drama Academy, where she also studied. The judges saw well that Pieters has great empathy for people in extreme circumstances. She is serious but still allows a few jokes. And a hint of poetry.
A cupboard opens and the most beautiful balloons float out, balloons in bright colours. That way, the dark grey of the bunker is just tolerable.
English (UK) 
Nederlands 
Français 
Comments are closed.