We are the forest. Christiane Jatahy achieves maximum impact at #HF16

There are countries in the world, where the boundaries between art disciplines are not as sharply drawn as they are here. The Holland Festival, under the new leadership of Ruth MacKenzie, is catching us up. She is bringing events here where the boundaries between visual art, performance, video, film and performing arts can no longer be drawn. Events that generate meaning in ways that are quite new to us, such as The Encounter, last week, and Gardens Speak, later this week.

The Walking Forest is perhaps the most powerful example of this different way of dealing with art and meaning. Brazilian Christiane Jatahy has created a spatial work that is simultaneously documentary, video art and theatre, where half of what is on offer is also a film shot on the spot, in which you as a spectator suddenly appear to play a role. It is fascinating to witness, and also provides a confrontational experience.

How she manages that? At the interview Helen Westerik did with Jatahy for this site, she explains well: 'In this piece, I wanted to explore the relationship between documentary and fiction. Usually the questions I want to explore arise in the piece that precedes it. Now, for example, it was how to make the relationship with the audience more intense. I wanted to make an installation in which the audience does not immediately know how and where to be.'

Earpiece

A small proportion of the audience is given an earpiece before the performance. I was one of those lucky ones. Once inside the auditorium, which resembles a modern video installation in a museum, I move around four projection screens like all the other spectators. On those screens are stories of refugees, stories of those in power pressuring them and their families. A story of someone whose life was destroyed because his mother asked him over the phone how the dog was doing: that conversation was taken as a code message by the secret service, and led to mass arrest, murder and torture, even though the dog was really sick.

And all the while, therefore, you walk there, with a few others, with an earpiece in. An earpiece, which also belongs to security guards, to those in power, to people with covert duties. People who take an interested phone call as a terror code.

After a few minutes, the first message arrives on the earpiece. Whether I, or one of the other men with earpiece, want to walk up to a woman, near the left corner of the bar. I am just too late, someone else is ahead of me. Later another message, whether I want to walk to the other corner of the bar, where another woman also a spectator with earpiece, is instructed to look at a glass for a very long time, and then drink it bottoms-up.

Film

Slowly, I am getting the idea that we, the people with earphones, are playing along in a film being shot on the spot. Fascinating idea, and because we know, we are already seeing more than the spectators without earphones.

Then the screens move, forming one elongated projection screen. There we suddenly see the film in which I had just played a part. Lyrics, nine lines to be precise, from William Shakespeare's play Macbeth are heard. That play, about a general who is whispered to by three witches that he is destined to become king, after which he proceeds to commit a series of horrific acts of terror, has served as the basis for this installation. The end of that classic comes when the united opponents of the dictator - camouflaged with branches from the surrounding forest - pounce on the ruler's castle: the walking forest puts an end to the terror.

This is The Walking Forest, and so we ourselves are that forest, in this performance, but there is something wrong with us. Jatahy manages to convey that message perfectly and very powerfully. We may be the forest, but we were just now also the fascinated spectators, the vassals of power and the people, much of whom advocate fences around the country, fear Muslims and like to see refugees as rapists and robbers of our happiness. And part also knew what was happening, because we had ears to hear.

'We are the forest', the play wants to say, but we are also the people who let it all happen without intervention. The forest may walk, but it does not act. What 9 lines of Shakespeare are not capable of. In Christiane Jatahy's hands, they are golden.