Boukje Schweigman's world is exciting, but never deadly. Whether she makes an experiential performance in a beautiful location during a summer festival, or takes a more artful approach in the plays she makes for theatres: you only see nice people. Even in Val, her latest. In it, we see a lot of nice people falling. Falling deeply, sometimes. But that falling happens to them, and has something totally inevitable about it, making it almost soothing.
In an art world where people like to be presented with "danger" and "death drive", Schweigman's theatre is always a statement to the contrary. This is brave, because you don't win the hearts of grant committees with nice people, nor those of reviewers who usually leave their sense of humour and nuance at home. That she has succeeded for years is because she has something very special, to compensate: a heartbreaking and disarming curiosity.
How does she do that?
How do you see that in 'Val'? It seems simple, but she makes you, the viewer, watch with her. And so the best place to start is in pitch darkness. Accompanied by thin, and sometimes heavy saxophone sounds, written by Yannis Kyriakides and performed by the Calefax quintet, you begin to discern slowly falling shapes in that earth darkness. They fall very slowly, caught in mid-air, gently wallowing, very calmly.
It is an image that reminded me of the horror of the burning towers in New York, September 11, 2001. The famous photo image of that falling man, neatly dressed in suit, briefcase in hand, but upside down, also exuded such bizarre calm. That image made the disaster palpable, but it suggested so much more. The performance is also not about the inevitable blow with which every fall ever ends, but about the beginning, and the middle. After all, walking is delayed falling, just as cycling and flying to the moon are.
Desire
In the end, we all fall. That's the simple moral you get. You can resist, as two dancers do for a dramatic time, but you will fall. So do we have that death drive here after all? The best part is that in Schweigman's performance it is not a drift, but a deeply felt desire to fall. The kind of desire, too, that makes people who, like me, are afflicted with vertigo shiver down their spines.
For a moment, the thought occurred to me that a piece like this should have an insert: don't try this at home. Or at that bridge, or with that selfie stick at that Norwegian fjord. But for something like that, this show is too loving. It's not about jumping, after all.
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Remembering Bas Jan Ader ... 8)
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