No foreign performances at the sixth PopArts festival. Are the budget cuts making themselves felt? The festival programmes internationally every other year, and this year it is staying close to home. With Nicola Unger, there were the other Dutch 'usual suspects' like Duda Paiva and guest artists from the Ulrique Quade Company. But De Krakeling and Ostadetheatre also featured young makers, each with ingenious, poetic constellations of objects, projections, music, light and actors.
Nicola Unger's Performance of One
Small but fine are the relationships, even during Nicola Unger's Performance of One - about how people fit themselves in socially. Unger alternates bitter irony with poetic gestures from her vest pocket theatre. Performance of One can be read as a light-hearted commentary on entrenched patterns or one-dimensionality in social intercourse.
Three musketeers
Three spectators are enticed by Unger to play the leading roles in her performance. Like puppets of flesh and blood, or quiz candidates, they are renamed the three musketeers, who are then renamed the altruist, the jester and the leader for this occasion. The artist remains unaffected, or rather, she is the one who stages and mirrors all three roles.
The exemplary masses
What begins as a conversation between artist and audience - about who is who and how roles are distributed in theatre - develops into a montage of icons and images, referring to social structures. The nuclear family eats potatoes, power is distributed by a leader. Swarming starlings show the beauty of an exemplarily functioning mass, but the gait of a human proceeding is less easy to capture in a single image. When Unger asks the three players to resist rather than conform to the pictures on the floor, her newfound musketeers don't know how to handle it.
Bridge too far
Performance of One is gentle, beautifully poetic from the off, but also confusing. It sticks an overly simple pattern on the players and, consequently, the rest of the audience. The role reversal of "One for all, all for one!" is long passé. And of course, social structures and institutions have a homogenising effect. Performance of One probleatises this in an unpretentious and playful way, but the righteous question of resistance seems a bridge too far in this representation of things that is too caught in simple contradictions.
[Tweet ""One for all, all for one!" is long passé"]
On Sunday, the Krakeling still features Cornelia Hanselman with Lowtech Magictheatre in 'Binnen regen het niet' (6+). And in the Ostadetheatre, home to Feike's Huis, named after the founding father of Dutch puppetry, Mirthe Dokter performs her widely acclaimed graduation show 'Ik Wou', and Carla Róisín Behal and Felipe González Cabezas can also be seen with 'Paramnesia.'
PopArts festival lasts until Sunday, February 15. For more information and tickets, see the PopArtsFestival website.
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