Walker Art Center presents
ONTROEREND GOED:
Are we not drawn onward to new erA
Out There 2023
Thursday – Saturday, January 12-14, 2023, 8:00 pm
McGuire Theater
Director
Alexander Devriendt
Cast
Angelo Tijssens, Jonas Vermeulen, Karolien De Bleser, Leonore Spee, Kristien De Proost, Michaël Pas
Dramaturgy
Jan Martens
Scenography
Philip Aguirre
Light, Video & Sound
Jeroen Wuyts, Babette Poncelet
Technical Assistance
Jeroen Wuyts, Seppe Brouckaert, Sarah Feyen
Costumes
Charlotte Goethals, Valerie Le Roy
Composition
William Basinski
Performed by SPECTRA Ensemble
Arrangements
Joris Blanckaert
Finishing Off Statue
Daan Verzele, Jelmer Delbecque, Jesse Frans
Photography
Mirjam Devriendt
Internships
Morgan Eglin, Tim De Paepe
Many thanks to Ilona Lodewijckx, Luc De Bruyne, Matthieu Goeury, Simon Stokes, Björn Doumen, Les Ballets C de la B, everybody involved in the pre-study ‘koortsmeetsysteemstrook’ @ Toneelacademie Maastricht, and our fantastic test-audiences.
The performance features William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops by SPECTRA Ensemble.
Additional members of Ontroerend Goed: Alexander Devriendt, David Bauwens, Wim Smet, Karen Van Ginderachter, Sarah Feyen, Beth Thyrion, Angelo Tijssens, Charlotte De Bruyne, Aurélie Lannoy, Karolien De Bleser
Ontroerend Goed in coproduction with SPECTRA, Kunstencentrum Viernulvier Gent, Theatre Royal Plymouth, Adelaide Festival, & Richard Jordan Productions.
About the Show
“Life must be lived forwards, but it can only be understood backwards.”
Like its title, this performance is a palindrome. You will be able to see it forwards and backwards. Because some people believe humanity is moving forward, while others believe the opposite. Some say the world is coming to an end, others call them doomsayers. No matter who’s right, in our quest for progress we have dramatically changed the world we live in. Are our actions irreversible or can we undo them? The performance presents a visual metaphor for this crucial moment in our future history. It traces the process of humans moving towards their downfall or salvation.
Related Event
Post-show Q & A with the artists
Friday, January 23, 2023
McGuire Stage
Restoring the Urban Canopy
A portion of ticket sales from this performance will be donated to Tree Trust, a Twin Cities-based non-profit organization with a mission to transform lives and landscapes by engaging people to build skills for meaningful careers, inspiring people to plant trees, and making our community a greener, healthier place to live.
About Ontroerend Goed
“The most consistently challenging theatre-makers of the past decade.”
– Scottish Journal of Performance
Theatre-performance-group Ontroerend Goed (a punning name, roughly translated as “Feel Estate”) produces self-devised work grounded in the here and now, inviting their audiences to participate as well as observe. They first emerged on the international scene in 2007, with The Smile Off Your Face, a one-on-one show in which the audience is tied to a wheelchair and then blindfolded. Their hit show Once and For All... was an uncompromising celebration of raw teenage energy on stage. With every new piece of work, Ontroerend Goed provides an intense experience constructed in reality; life goes on during the performance.
The company has won numerous awards across Europe and has hit New York, Sydney, London and Hong Kong to critical acclaim. Their work is currently being performed in countries around the world. Ontroerend Goed functions as a collective guided by the artistic director Alexander Devriendt. Convinced that every idea deserves its own brand of artistic expression, the company cherishes a sense of ownership for every single contributor to their work, from actors to light designers, scenographers to conceptual thinkers. Ontroerend Goed fabricates possible realities that question how we as individuals position ourselves in the world today. Covering a history of the universe in one evening, turning spectators into voters who eliminate actors, guiding strangers through a labyrinth of mirrors and avatars to meet themselves, the company has made it its trademark to be unpredictable in content and form.
Ontroerend Goed has been touring the world for the last 15 years with their personal trilogy (The Smile Off Your Face, Internal, A Game of You), Audience, A History Of Everything (with Sydney Theatre Company), with their teenage hits Once And For All We’re All Going To Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up And Listen, Teenage Riot and All That Is Wrong, the political game show Fight Night, the palindrome-trip Are we not drawn onward to new erA, the feminist manifesto Sirens, and their most recent shows World Without Us, £¥€$ and Loopstation.
Ontroerend Goed is Alexander Devriendt, Charlotte De Bruyne, Charlotte Nyota Bischop, Aurélie Lannoy, Karolien De Bleser, Angelo Tijssens, David Bauwens, Wim Smet, Koen De Wilde, and Karen Van Ginderachter. Ontroerend Goed is David Bauwens, Wim Smet, Koen De Wilde, Karen Van Ginderachter, Alexander Devriendt, Joeri Smet, Angelo Tijssens, Charlotte De Bruyne, Karolien De Bleser, Aurélie Lannoy & Charlotte Nyota Bischop.
More About the Show
The following is an excerpt from the introduction of Ontroerend Goed's book, Pieces Of Work.
Are we not drawnonward to new erA is one of Ontroerend Goed’s purest theatrical works. The concept perfectly merges form and content. At the centre of the performance is a fictional, though scientifically claimed, described and predicted, calamitous “point zero.” It is the moment when humanity has caused so much damage to the planet, that it has become uninhabitable for our species. From that point in time, the performance goes back and forth, creating a palindrome of inevitability and melancholy contemplation.
A History of Everything, another Ontroerend Goed show, was a great source of inspiration for this production. Going back in time, telling history from the here-and-now all the way back to the Big Bang, gave Alexander the idea to try and perform a show in reverse. Literally and technically, by having the actors move backwards, speak backwards, iterate the narrative back to front - and this time much more rigorously than A History of Everything had achieved.
Early in the rehearsal process, Alexander ran a test to explore the technical possibilities and restrictions of the concept. Already in this first stage, it was essential to film the performance and then project the footage in reverse to achieve the intended effect, i.e. that the seemingly absurd, incomprehensible actions on stage would suddenly make sense to the audience.
The challenge was huge. Actors would have to practice speaking in reverse, in a way that would result in comprehensible speech when played in reverse on tape. A simple, spontaneous movements such as walking had to look natural when rewound - which it doesn’t, if actors just step backwards. The research soon revealed interesting notions. For example, the effects of gravity had to be avoided by all means. An object dropping to the floor looks like an object jumping off the floor in reverse. Impossible. A broken object cannot miraculously self-repair. Eating things, breaking things, melting things, dissolving things, were a no-go. All of this, if the reverse version needed to look entirely natural and plausible in the real world.
But perhaps that kind of strict realism wasn’t entirely necessary. Perhaps the impossible, “magical” effects of the reverse footage would add to the message of the show. As much as Alexander wanted to present a meticulously performed fantasy of going back and forth in time, a true palindrome, he also wanted to convey the idea that some things are indeed irreversible. It was precisely in the irreversible actions, the ones that cannot be undone and would therefore look “unrealistic” in reverse, that a broader message could be communicated. They would allow him to highlight our responsibility towards the impact of our behaviour. The theme of the performance became obvious, and suited the formal concept perfectly: ecology. More specifically, climate change and the destructive impact of humanity’s polluting activities on earth. Human actions such as walking forward, walking backward, can be reversed. But destroying a tree cannot be reversed. Once it’s done, there’s no way back. It would take tremendous force and defiance of natural laws, to repair the damage. Which is exactly what the performance shows.
One of the leading metaphors of the performance is Easter Island. The history of a people, isolated on a small, relatively infertile island, slowly consuming all resources until their downfall becomes inevitable, seems to hold a warning for humanity in its present state. In addition, there are references to Genesis, the tree of life, Adam and Eve, and original sin. There are references to the megalomania of certain civilisations, represented by the enormous golden statue of an unspecified human shape. The language of the performance is mainly imagery, simple in its form and multi-interpretable. The movements are often constructed to get different interpretations according to the context. A greeting becomes a farewell. An invitation becomes a refusal. Watching becomes looking the other way.
Another great inspiration for Are we not drawn onward to new erA is the composition The Disintegration Loops by the American composer William Basinski. It is based on his attempt to transfer 1980s ambient music from magnetic tape into digital format. As the tapes passed the tape head, they gradually deteriorated, leaving gaps and cracks in the music. Basinski played them in loops, resulting in music that is literally decaying - disintegrating. The combination of forward-reaching loops and irreversible destruction reflects the essence of the performance.
In the Infinite Trilogy (A History Of Everything (2012), Are we not drawn onward to new erA (2015), and World Without Us (2016)) this show takes the middle position. It is the here-and-now, reflected in the central monologue. The reverse live performance is like a memory, reiterating all that happened in the past. All that happened, leading up to the point of no return. The footage represents the hope for the future, a dream in which humanity repairs the damage it has caused. The miracles happening in the footage - broken pots reassemble, plastic bags rise to the sky and disappear, trees are brought back to life - are a delight, but they also stress the enormous efforts required to make our world healthy again. And by the end, it raises the sad, delicate thought that perhaps we as a species should disappear altogether.
About the Music
The Disintegration Loops is based on William Basinski’s attempts to salvage earlier recordings made on magnetic tape in the early 1980s by transferring them into digital format. However, the tape had deteriorated to the point that, as it passed by the tape head, the ferrite detached from the plastic backing and fell off. The loops were allowed to play for extended periods as they deteriorated further, with increasing gaps and cracks in the music. These sounds were treated further with a spatializing reverd effect. Basinski has said that he finished the project the morning of the 9/11 on the WTC in New York and sat on the roof of his apartment building in Brooklyn with friends listening to the project as the towers collapse. In collaboration with the composer, Spectra Ensemble recorded a version of The Disintegration Loops. The original tape recordings were arranged for 6 musicians by Belgian composer Joris Blanckaert.
About the Statue
For Are we not drawn onward to new erA, Ontroerend Goed collaborated with the Belgian artist Philip Aguirre y Otegui. He mainly works as a sculptor and painter. His work usually centres around migration and refugees, water, and the shelter of architecture. His father, Juan Martin Aguirre, originally came from Las Arenas in Spanish Basque Country, but moved as a child to Antwerp (Belgium) in 1936, when the Spanish Civil War started. His mother’s family suffered under the German occupation and the persecution of Jews in Belgium during the second World War. Aguirre studied in Antwerp and now lives in Borgerhout, one of Belgium’s most diverse neighbourhoods. In 2017, he won the International Award for Public Art for his 2010 installation Théatre Source in Douala, Cameroon. In 2015, a 45-minute documentary about the making of this work was created by cineast Koen Van den Bril. It showed how a muddy well was transformed in 9 months’ time into a meeting place for a village. Art publisher Ludion also made a book about the installation. His work is influenced by Frans Masereel (for the humanistic vision and the effort to bring art to the people), the sculptors Brancusi and Giacometti, photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo and contemporary Belgian artist Francis Alÿs.
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