A Korean in a military suit singing karaoke, a crotchety dancer mewling with her knees kneading the floor, eight elderly people sweeping in and a son who turns out to be the father. Don't try to interpret this performance, the line of believability is miles behind you. Welcome to Father.
'Nothing can be taken for granted anymore, boundaries are blurring, the old is shaking on its foundations.' Such is the dynamic that the Dutch Theatre Festival concerns this year. Father of Peeping Tom (peeper) fits in perfectly. The Brussels-based company likes to give a glimpse of a "tilting universe that disrupts the usual logic of time, space and atmosphere". But it also makes you part of it. In Father you are condemned, as it were, to be present in the sad auditorium of a nursing home with a stage on it. Until you are relieved and allowed to go back to freedom a little wiser.
Does the attendant who appears silently in the light of the doorway even hear the young visitor's question? He slowly bows his head to answer suddenly. The click in your head (i.e. he heard it after all) is made where the picture was wrong before. Peeping Tom likes to make you jump from the left brain to the right brain. Father betrays from the start a fine sense of humour and detail.
Exactly when one of the residents is taken (according to the monotone voice on a rotten intercom, someone stole a bunch of keys), protagonist Leo The Executioner enters. There is more often a countermovement in the action. The best example of this is the young dancer who addresses the father's son, a wonderful role by Simon Versnel, and when the latter starts gabbing, she snaps, to crawl convulsively across the floor diagonally backwards under a tablecloth. Who wouldn't want to dodge a conversation like that once in a while?
Interestingly, director Frank Chartier has a solid background in classical ballet. At Rosella Hightower's elite school, he will have been drilled to think and dance the heights. In Father however, his dancers sidle to the ground and do on their knees what dancers do standing: walk, speed forward and even do pirouettes. Razor-sharp and unprecedentedly beautiful. Especially Yi-Chun Liu who follows the brushes of the jazz drummer with her swishing hair across the ground.
It is difficult to maintain the tension throughout the performance, though. Some phrases also seem inserted based on the talents of the performers. The Brazilian Maria Carolina Vieira, for instance, sings not undeservedly without reason Águas de Março, to then dance an acrobatic shoe fetish solo. Besides a menacing sound composition, the music is remarkably light anyway (Feelings, What a Difference a Day Makes), perhaps a relic from the time Chartier danced with Maurice Béjart.
But actually Father About relationships and the disintegration during ageing. And about a father-son relationship. This is particularly evident in Jos Baker's full-on tirade at the end against his father, in this oppressive Brussels house attached to Hermans' The tears of acacias reminiscent. It is here everyone flew over the cuckoo's nest. Except patriarch Leo The Executioner. He is actually the only resting point in this morass of sinking oldsters and other characters. A twilight zone we can all end up in eventually.
Tip: on 1 October, a work by Frank Chartier will have its world premiere at Nederlands Dans Theater.
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