You think you are buying a ticket for Springdance, but actually you are making an appointment at the office, at the Central Museum. Once let inside the waiting room, staff walk busily past you and the doorman takes one call after another. You obediently fill in a form. As usual, you have to reveal all sorts of personal details. And then that question: what was the best performance you ever saw? For a moment, you can't think of anything at all.
The kind man who precedes you does not tell you where it is going. You are not just a spectator, or even a guest, you suddenly have a role, if only that of innocent victim. As you take your seat behind a desk, somewhat startled, you wonder what kind of scenario that would be? No one speaks to you. Only the occasional printed clue appears on a small card. "Follow me". Everyone is extremely friendly. Except for the surly man, gaping as he passes by. Surely that was just an employee of the museum?
A scream on the toilet, high-heeled legs sticking out of a drawer. Of course, it is immediately clear to anyone visiting 'Field Works - office' who really works at the museum and who has been hired by Avdal and Shinozaki. But the game works. Behind every filing cabinet, I expect a burning bin after a while, or worse. The new role silently assigned to the viewer, under guided museum officials' wild viewing, has no clear rules.The actors mimic the real savages, exaggerating and magnifying, but slowly impregnating the viewer with a different, slightly absurd or perverse perspective on the matter.
As a spectator, you can only guess at what is actually expected of you. What role have the many actors assigned you now? All kinds of scenarios unfold automatically in the mind. The spectator-visitor can choose. Does he stay at a distance and thus break the game of the others ever so slightly? Or will he join in and be sucked further and further into the world of the performance? Can you become part of a scenario you don't really want to act in at all?
Never do the actors get really pushy. Always they are equally polite and presentable, as they should be with guests in the office. Brynjar Åbel Brandlien makes very gentle cartoon drawings. Instead of verbal exchanges, his drawings are presented to you, like elegant hints the papers sometimes fly around your ears. They seem merely playful suggestions, but sometimes something goes wrong in those drawings.
As I leave the premises 30 minutes later, walking through the sun towards the Oude Gracht, I see people doing strange things all over the street. A poster announces a Romantic party at the Baptist church? I shudder and don't believe myself.
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