To spark discussion, the Walker invites Twin Cities artists and critics to write reviews of our performances. The ongoing Re:View series shares a diverse array of independent voices and opinions; it doesn’t reflect the views or opinions of the Walker or its curators. Here, multimedia artist and writer Rene Meyer-Grimberg shares her perspective on last night’s presentation of BERLIN’s Zvizdal [Chernobyl, so far—so close].
If you travel through Pennsylvania along Highway 78 between Harrisburg and Allentown, next to the Dutch Gift Haus, there is a building holding 7,500 square feet of miniatures called “Roadside America,” with electric trains running through it. Hidden are little scenes that play out and witty touches you can find as you watch the trains careen through the artificial countryside.
BERLIN, the Antwerp-based theater and multimedia ensemble, creates small sets that you want to interact with in this same way, but it adds a documentary narrative that plays out on screen near the reproduced landscape. In 2011, the group came to the Walker with their five-screen documentary named after a Colorado town, Bonanza, complete with a model of the silver-mining town (population: 7) tilted toward the audience over the screens. After the show everyone in the audience wanted to take a look up close. To scrutinize the technical wonder of the parts—smoke, window lights, moving parts—that emphasized moments in the narrative. To look once, look again, watch the documentary, look more deeply and come away moved by the story that unfolds in front of you.
That’s how one might view a work by BERLIN: Look once, look again, watch the documentary, look more deeply, and come away moved by the story that unfolds in front of you.
For Zvizdal, a large screen is placed in the middle of matching sets of bleachers, white with black molded-wood seats. It’s a beautifully engineered enclosure that feels like an operating theater. Under the screen, two arms with fists of cameras are mounted and move along the underside of the screen, back and forth, to film the three Petri-dish–like models placed under the screen. One dish is the Lubonoc farm in Zvizdal, set in the summer with green leaves; the middle dish is the same farm buried in snow; and the third is a leafless and lifeless version of the farm. These three spaces and seasons of work and hardship contain the lives of an elderly couple, Nadia and Pétro, and while they live on the screen, they are static in the Petri dishes—like a patient etherized on a table. Strategically placed in the little scale models are animals, unpainted clay versions of Nadia and Pétro, and tiny screens embedded in the building’s walls—all things the audience is drawn to observe more closely.
The focus of the performance is this spot on the earth; not to be distracted by other places when the movie starts, the first screen is pure white. The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is a 2,600-square-mile contaminated area in Ukraine located at the center of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. When the white screen at the beginning of the film fades into the daylight, a guard moves a gate marked “STOP” to let us in, and we on our way to Zvizdal. Droning music and rough overgrown roads stretch 15 miles to the farm of the Lubenocs, the last living remaining inhabitants of the village. They never want to leave. Everyone else has moved out and into housing supplied by the government. As Nadia says, “A foreign house is like a cruel mother-in-law.”
Tenacity and interest led the journalist and dramaturg Cathy Blisson to pass her knowledge of this couple on to BERLIN’s Bart Beale and Yves Degryse. The mind boggles at the sheer effort of the undertaking to film this couple, documenting the humanity of their plight, the subtle politics and history of place, the timelessness of their daily existence—watching it unfold. Five years of biannual visits to filming in the empty village on their farm in Zone One (the highest level of radioactive contamination). Five years of never knowing if the octogenarians would be alive the next time they drove seven hours in the snow to get there. Five years with the same translator and a relationship of trust that evolved. Since 1986, the couple had lived with no electricity, no running water, no heat. They subsist on potatoes, mushrooms, and water. Greens to feed the animals through the winter must constantly be collected—their work is survival in a zone which theoretically should be uninhabitable. And, nevertheless, somehow the birds still chirp, the animals still graze, and this elderly couple survives. How contaminated is it, really? The scrutiny we are invited to undertake cannot answer all our questions.
Is this work an art installation? A multimedia performance? A documentary? Is it transmedia? You settle in as an audience member to watch as you would a performance, but the sensorial stimulation is more complex as you witness the mechanics of the camera moving, the Petri dishes, and fine details in the model, adding layers of sensory information to the piece. Cars appear that weren’t there before. There is a childish delight about what might come next, as you feel the dire nature of their situation. The piece feels like part operation theater with the audience involved in observations of the specimens and part “Roadside Ukraine” with trucks in the snow replacing the trains in the landscape. The documentary narrative enhances the models, and Nadia and Pétro settle in your heart as you worry about their fate (with great narrative tricks stringing you along).
How will this end? Zvizdal is the ultimate documentary of aging, which simultaneously addresses issues of environmental catastrophe, human nature, and the politics of place—and the accessibility of the narrative makes it the least “out there” of the 2019 season.
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