In Detroit Dealers, Wunderbaum mixes a personal family story with the decline of Detroit, once one of the most influential industrial cities in the world, and philosophical musings on the car, as a romantic metaphor of progress and the American Dream. The performance swings in all directions.
Detroit Dealers is part documentary film, jazz concert, performance, spoken word poetry, rap battle, and theatre. This overdose of ideas is hard to follow, but the performance is saved by unexpected musical virtuosity.
How disruptive can a theatre performance start? In the showroom of Van Vloten car dealership, a drummer and saxophonist go all out in razor-sharp, fired-up free jazz, while two Wunderbaumactors are swinging hypothermically and the audience climbs into the stands. One audience member slips, takes a nasty hit and hurts herself so badly that she has to be taken away. The band coolly keeps on pounding. Then Detroit Dealers really begins, with a 20-minute documentary.
Theatre maker Walter Bart travelled to Detroit in search of his distant family and, together with colleagues Maartje Remmers and Gerbrand Burger, filmed his quest. Following in the footsteps of Bart's grandfather, car dealer Arie, who ended up in Detroit on a business trip in the 1950s. Arie was doing good business in The Motor City and one lonely night he looked deep into the eyes of nightclub singer Florence. Result: a love baby. So many years on, Walter, as a white Dutch lad, decided to look up his African-American family. Thus the sympathetic beginning of Detroit Dealers.
Bart became fascinated by Detroit. Once, The Motor City was the heart & soul of the US auto industry. Now it is a post-capitalist no man's land. The big companies have left, the economy has collapsed, there is massive vacancy and poverty. But those left behind, like his niece Rosemarie Wilson, are armed with an extraordinary zest for life and self-reliance. Rosemarie turns out to be an incredibly nice person, and also as a spoken word poet not afraid to climb on stage. So she plays in Detroit Dealers.
That's interesting enough, you might say.
Unfortunately, the family story almost gets buried in the Wunderbaum storm of ideas. It seems as if the makers have crammed all the impressions and insights gained during the journey into one performance, and then thematically hung on 'the car'. So come in Detroit Dealers battle raps for and against the car past, a cycling jihadi in a clown mask shouting that all cars should die, to weird monologues in which the car passes in three female dreamscapes - from sexy sex object, through rancid polluter, to eco-friendly and hyper-modern - embodied by Remmers in tight-fitting rompers.
Fortunately, the musical composition by Bo Koek, played with fire by Jens Bouttery and Andrew Claes, for plenty of unexpected and exciting contrasts. This is how Detroit Dealers continues to fascinate all the same. Free jazz, electronica, hip hop and glitch flow through each other. Rosemarie also proves to have a dyke of a singing voice in addition to her fierce raps and poety spit.
At the end of Detroit Dealers, Rosemarie and Walter play the first meeting between their two grandparents - filmed from a distance, and projected in black and white against the side walls. Florence determined and sultry, Arie nervous and clumsily charming. Beautifully played by both, with a disarming flair. I would have liked to have seen more scenes like this.
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