People trying to recover from burnout often have a striking urge to dig in the earth. To get things done. To plant a tree. Planting potatoes. So it was hardly surprising that, during a conversation about burnout that afternoon in Groningen’s Noorder Plantsoen, two men referred to those kinds of primal urges.
Louis Vanhaverbeke, a dancer and object theatre maker from Belgium, went through this in 2020, he told his interviewer. The coronavirus brought his work to a standstill and his mind went into overdrive. He was completely overwhelmed and found recovery through studying biodynamic agriculture. After all, saving the world is the very least you can do after suffering a burnout in the creative sector.
Concrete
He has now created a performance based on his extensive experience of farm life, which he has deliberately chosen not to stage on a farmyard, but in a concrete setting. In Groningen, he discovered the recent industrial heritage of the Niemeyer factory, where, after years of getting people hooked on Samson, they are now making way for AI creatives.
During that preliminary discussion between the two burnout survivors with first-hand experience (the interviewer had also suffered from one), it also became clear that the performance *Tractor Rhapsody* takes place far from the farmyard for a reason. Louis Vanhaverbeke is, in fact, rather romantically inclined, and was put off by the intense pressure to produce on a large scale and the big business that is inevitably associated with agriculture, even biodynamic farming.
Cradle
So, in the performance, we saw a rather clumsy man with a cute miniature tractor and miniature tools tilling the land, sowing seeds, fearing a giant caterpillar, ploughing, planting, and anyone in the know will realise from the order of these activities that Louis Vanhaverbeke was not born to be a farmer.
All of this was accompanied by sweet, yet rather clichéd remarks about circularity, the blessings of the countryside, life in general – a sort of spoken word muttered whilst Louis drove his machines around.
At the end, he hands out the text, which has been lovingly designed to look like a sort of harvest calendar. A lot of work has gone into it.
Signal messages
The script by Lastivka, in the production “She Stands In The Middle Of The Battlefield”, isn’t entirely free. I saw that hugely impressive production an hour later at the Grand Theatre in Groningen. Lastivka is the name of a female theatre maker, Ukrainian, who in 2024 decides to go to the front as a soldier.
Actress and multi-instrumentalist Agata Różycka recites, in a serene and masterful manner, the text messages the young woman sends to her sister. At the same time, we see her moving, almost as if dancing, across an obstacle course in ‘safe’ Poland on film. With this, the Polish director Magda Szpecht has created a production that is deeply moving on every level.
Anti-LGBTI
In the news reports, we follow the young woman, full of ideals and visions of equality, high moral values and human rights. First in training, then on the battlefield, then from the trenches. The texts cut ever deeper into your soul, and because you know it’s real, the impact is all the greater. Not because it’s being portrayed as so incredibly dramatic. We also hear doubt; we witness how the anti-LGBTQ+ mentality – which the Ukrainian woman is also fighting against – is no less prevalent amongst her own soldiers. War makes everyone equal, and not in the most noble way.
The actions on stage are precise, understated and at times even reminiscent of Louis Vanhaverbeke’s toy farm. Except that here it is a baby drone with a broken rotor, a laser rangefinder and a stringed instrument made of motor springs that take turns to endear themselves to us and strike fear into our hearts.
Don’t compare
In this performance, art is created from the most unimaginable things. It is a tremendous achievement, and its impact still resonates a day later.
It wouldn’t be right to compare theatre maker Louis’s farming ambitions with actress Lastivka’s war experience. So we won’t do that. They need spuds at the front, too. Let’s celebrate in our own way the fact that a festival like Noorderzon, with a combination like this on a warm August’s day, can make you realise just how unimaginably bizarre life can be.
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