Fringed upon arrival
David Lynch movies. Meals brimming with packaging, eaten with your elbows pinned to your sides. Recycled farts. Suppressed belches. Twitchy sleep and dreams of falling. Impending claustrophobia. Six hours in the outer level of hades known as Dubai airport.
Repeat.
Hello Schipol.
I’m not complaining, it’s just that 22 hours in transit makes for a rather dissociated headspace. Place a performance by Club Gewalt at the new Amsterdam Fringe hub in the revived, rejuvenated and now pink bespotted Finjnhout Theatre on top of that and you feel as if you’re existing in a dream conjured by Dali were he Dutch.
Just pass the beer.
Club Gewalt have taken over the new three-year fringe hub agreement, in charge of ongoing entertainment for the duration of the festival, following on from Club Silenzio.
As expected, they offer the unexpected, chosen because they can be relied on to push boundaries and expand definitions.
They have a number of different performances every evening and I have no idea which one I watched as I stood among the mostly-young crowd on each side of a demarcated wedge facing the low stage in a theatre that had been reassembled after having been stripped by its owner some years ago.
Downstage was a tripod-mounted video recorder pointing toward the wedge dividing us. Enter a troupe of eight performers in pink plether jumpsuits or jackets, crouching below the lens sightline, the camcorder playing the diagonally divided black and white backrop onto the screen upstage.
Cue music, a narration about the architect of the twin towers and dental concerns and a list of other seemingly unrelated things my blanched brain failed to retain. Something about Man on a Wire written on a card placed before the recording lens.
The troupe, among us, close enough knock your drink with an elbow, then choreographed their own movie, shifting forward and back to zoom, sideways to pan. Dropping and jumping, moving in and out in a strange dance dictated by converting three dimensions into two.
What the narrative of this innovative real-time movie was, or whether there was a narrative at all, didn’t matter. In fact they basically created a music video of sorts in black, white and pink. MC Hammer would be proud.
What they created was not innovative, how they did it was.
Special effects were included by holding a cut glass before the lens and actors using their cellphone torches to create highlights and backlights.
Content was of lesser importance than creation. The How of greater magnitude than the Why as what is important here is how the medium (film, theatre) is disrupted, all rules broken to create an altered product that is neither film nor dance but new hybrid that is pure, perception-altering performance.
Welcome to the Amsterdam Fringe. Bring on the new.