Experiencing art is sometimes quite complicated. Theatre artist Lemi Ponifasio made sure, at Amare in The Hague, that I spent a good hour and a half looking at a black - and later white - gauze screen, behind which there were members of the Chinese Yi minority, bewildered, annoyed and sometimes bored but always fascinated. The Yi are a very
The Yi are a very ancient people, according to learning Wikipedia us, and in their culture, in which shamanism plays a role, we distinguish 'black Yi' and 'white Yi', with the black Yi forming the ruling class, and white Yi being enslaved. This retrospective knowledge explains why Ponifacio chose a monochrome stage setting in which white faces and hands move through an otherwise black world according to strictly geometric patterns, or just completely rectangular.
Nuclear explosion in slow motion
The Yi also sing, which is a separate experience. The female voices in particular have a shrill purity that seems strange to Western ears. The chants, recited without surtitles in the performance, almost all start with an upward moving fifth (five notes in the scale), where we are usually used to a fourth (the national anthem). By themselves, the voices could easily fill a stadium with their sound and volume, but for the stage sound, all the figures behind the mesh cloth were equipped with transmitter microphones. Mixed over a soundscape that can best be described as a rocket launch, earthquake or nuclear explosion in slow motion, this produces a loud edginess that becomes quite irritating after a few times.
For the hour-and-a-half this work lasts, it fails to build contact between hall and stage. Those who are there sing against a black wall, and there is little feedback in the auditorium. What, for me at least, is an essential part of the theatre experience, the contact between hall and stage, is deliberately broken.
Aquarium
Earlier this festival, Romeo Castellucci applied that trick to Bérénice, and there the controversial choice could still be explained in terms of content. What Ponifacio achieves with the use of gauze and sound is as yet not entirely clear to me. The stage is quite hermetically sealed off from the rest of The Hague, and that still gives you the feeling that you are watching an aquarium.
The stage image did not tolerate surtitles either, and that is quite understandable from the artist's point of view, but the lack of that reaching out to a new audience increases the distance too much. Then characters like those hydrogen bomb explosions, projected on a small flag, that space helmet from which ash first pours out and later still fits a whole astronaut (Bowie fans perked up for a moment: Blackstar, Major Tom?!), and those men behind black shields are mostly confusing anyway.
First Contact
So why did we spend that hour and a half fascinated? Let me see it as a form of 'first contact', where we, the visitors, especially do not yet make physical contact, to avoid contamination. That 'prime directive', another highly personal reference to Star Trek, I'd rather see violated more often.
