From today, the documentary screening tours Tagfish through the Netherlands. The Belgian theatre collective Berlin has been creating finely crafted theatre installations since 2004, playing on the border of documentary and fiction, television and theatre, actuality and eternity.
Tagfish is ostensibly about the perils surrounding the redevelopment of a piece of derelict coal mining land near Essen. Die Zeche Zollverein had monumental status even before its closure in 1986 and was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001. Rem Koolhaas drew the master plan, and among the stilted steel, red brick, concrete and the bushes sprouting here and there, a 'cultural area' furnished, known to theatre lovers for its excellent theatre programme at Pact Zollverein and the Ruhrtriënnale.
Tagfish focuses on one part of this massive conversion, the plan of communications professor and property developer Rempen, which requires a sloppy 140 million, to be provided by the Saudi Hani Yamani. It seems like a lot, but within the restructuring of the Ruhr, it is of course peanuts. And that is how the developer, the urban planner, the financial controller and the architect talk about it.
Actually - though it's hard to admit - as a viewer, you know from the start that this story is too good to be true: a sheikh buying world heritage to invest in a wellness hotel, an art academy and a creative-company-collecting building? If Berlin had wanted to show the political poker game, she would have brought real poker players to the table. Tagfish confronts the viewer with something very different from the political game.
In a beautiful montage of documentary footage and small theatrical gestures, Berlin stages men's manners as they really exist, and not just in the newspaper. They have been willing to recount their years of negotiations with each other and, allegedly, with the sheikh in front of the Berlin camera. The virtual meeting that ensues, led by one Mr Finger, is hilarious. Tagfish is poker jargon for risk-free play and that is what the men do.
Tagfish ridiculises not so much the power of administrators, but rather their ventriloquism. By impressing each other with hollow phrases and thick gestures, by taking themselves and each other terribly seriously (as only men can), they keep the process going for years, without any tangible result. The emptiness does not only speak from their language. A cheerful grave mood also rises from the setting. It brings to mind the anonymity of fancy hotel chains and the tinsel of casinos. What masquerades as a documentary thus slowly reveals itself as a contemporary fairy tale: once upon a time, there were five men, they had a fantastic plan, but an angry sheikh threw a spanner in the works.
Horror Vacui is the name of the series of which Tagfish is the first part. Last year, part 3, Perhaps all the Dragons, was shown at Festival de Keuze in Rotterdam. For the tour along Den Bosch, Eindhoven, Utrecht, Almere and Rotterdam, see the website of Berlin
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