No Change teaches how to let go of codes at the Holland Festival

On Wednesday 18 June, the shorts offered the bravest resistance. In the stands of Frascati 1, the tension was palpable. Would DD Dorvillier still manage to free her foot from the garment without using her hands? Restrained laughter can be heard here and there, but there is also silence. Who never tries that: kicking out trousers like that? And don't we all experience the occasional failure?

The performance No Change, programmed at Frascati on Tuesday and Wednesday because of the Holland Festival, gave us a new insight into the world of Trajal Harrell. He also brings outside his sanctuary on the north bank of the IJ the kind of experimental dance we see very little of here. 

Own code

They are performances that bring their own code. For a viewer unfamiliar with them, these can be quite difficult to place. In this case, by the way, I am speaking entirely for myself. For example, I didn't know whether I liked should find. That was also because I felt that everyone around me knew things I didn't. And was looking very serious. Or was just bored. Could be too. 

So that is the sense of exclusion that art sometimes brings: even a regular theatre can seem intimidating to a non-regular visitor. Not because the building or the offering itself is intimidating, but because all the other more regular visitors seem to know something you don't. This is why a punk feels uncomfortable at Mahler at the Concertgebouw, and why a ballet lover will feel rejected at an intrusive piece of mourning art from Lebanon. However unjustified. 

Slapstick

So this time I couldn't take a stand at DD Dorvillier's seemingly loose-sand movements and wondered if we were now watching a literal reconstruction of an improvisation from 2005, which would again make it fit the festival theme found earlier that repetition of form does not necessarily lead to repetition of impact? Such long sentences, then. That's what you get. 

But Dorvillier's movements, her wrestling with garments and cords, those unruly devices containing microphones that all record sound: it was very funny, bordering on slapstick here and there. But so then you think you are watching too superficially. While there is no wrong way to watch. That much I know after decades of watching theatre professionally. 

Dead pan

Until suddenly a male emerges and plays a few notes on a ready piano before leaving through a side door. All completely 'dead pan', that is, with the steely face that belongs to absurdist comedy. Laughter rolls through the room.

No Change thus jettisons your own ideas about how to relate to such theatre. Yet another reason why Trajal Harrell's input as associate artist of this Holland Festival is so refreshing. You wouldn't easily experience something like this outside this context. Too bad the auditorium was only half full.