Institutet (SWE) & Nya Rampen (FIN): Conte D’amour DEMO#1
20.11.2009 Baltic Circle Lounge, Universum, Helsinki
By the time you read this, director and set designer Markus Örn’s Conte D’amour - a "love story" – will be premiering in Berlin. It’s not meant to be a crowd pleaser. Institutet’s artistic director and the performance's scriptwriter, Anders Carlsson, told the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat last November that one of capitalism’s biggest mistakes is that the customer is always right. That insightful and refreshing remark has been in my thoughts since then. As a director for a municipal theatre, the notion of "what the audience likes" hangs over my head like the sword of Damocles, every single day. Institutet and Nya Rampen believe that the customer/viewer is not always right. With this in mind, I will take a look at Conte D’amour’s first demo performance. I would like to underline the fact that I am writing about an unfinished work, and not a signed and sealed performance.
DEMO#1 begins with three actors performing Chris Isaak’s song Wicked Game in front of the curtain, accompanied by an acoustic guitar. This is the epilogue, during which the theme and the family’s children are introduced: Cellar Boy, age 1 and a half years (Anders Carlsson), Cellar Boy 2, age 18 (Rasmus Slätis), and Cellar Girl, age 19 (Elmer Bäck). Video footage of a cement mixer being filled with cement appears above the curtain. The curtain opens, revealing a narrow, 2-metre high structure built from construction site scaffolding. The upper floor has a sofa on the left and a low cupboard towards the right, sectioning off the space. Dressed in his bathrobe and briefs, the Patriarch (Jakob Öhrman) sits on the sofa scratching his balls. He grins impudently at the audience, combing his greasy hair. Lying on the couch next to him are four thin, homespun marionettes stuffed with cotton wool. The children lurking downstairs manipulate the dolls’ strings. It looks like the man is watching television with his family. The Patriarch gets a bottle of Coca Cola from the cupboard and drinks. He makes one of the dolls drink, spilling coke on them. Then he gets a bag of chips, eats, and crushes some chips against another doll's face. Whenever the man goes to the kitchen cupboard, the dolls jump off of the sofa and teeter along the edge of the scaffolding. The Patriarch rearranges them on the couch again. The video’s events have developed from mortar-making to the mixing stage, where the soft mass of cement churns inside the machine. The scene fills up with the jarring sound of the cement mixer. The Patriarch goes to the cupboard again, but this time a red light shines out of it. The man crawls through the cupboard into the mid-space on the right, which has an opening into the cellar. The mid-space is bathed in red light. The Patriarch stands with his back turned to the crowd and looks as though he would be pissing into the space downstairs. Menacing music plays as the Patriarch circles the opening like a wary cat. Then he dives downstairs. The tube lights flicker on in the cellar. A single bed stands in the left corner, a divan on the right. Cellar Girl, wearing heavy make-up, lies on the divan looking indifferent and singing into a microphone. Meanwhile, a second video begins upstairs – live footage of the happenings in the cellar as filmed by Cellar Boy 2.
AUDIENCE DISLODGED FROM THE TIMES
My first reaction during the performance is sadness. Sadness for the fact that I seldom see this kind of theatre in Finland. And if I do, it is either marginal or exceptional. Conte D’amour so obviously depicts the theatre of our times that it’s painful to imagine that someone might think it too hard to read. And it is. How distant this is from the expectations of the average Finnish city theatre audience! I feel like citing Juha Hurme’s novel Puupää:
"...historia jymisi kulkuaan, ja mennyt aika lohkesi irti nykyisestä. Ja sinne jäi N. heilumaan uhmakkaasti omaan aikasaarekkeeseensa..."
(”…history thundered along its course, and a chunk of the past broke off from the present. And N. stayed where he was, defiant on his own island of time…”)
The mass audiences will stay with N. on his dislodged chunk of the past – this is my rebellious thought as I continue watching the performance. I follow it with primarily an aesthetic eye, not considering its content too much. I like the imagery of the performance; the narrow, architectural two-storiedness pressed against a wall, and the way the scaffolding divided the scene into different sections. The video material deepens, increases and breaks up the image surfaces in an appealing way. The scenes in themselves are image-like, static, and not very verbal. For much of the time the characters just stare at each other while ominous music plays, and nothing happens to develop the plot as such. This is of course an indecent and outrageous refusal to make use of the dynamic laws of drama, and it intrigues me both aesthetically and as a statement of the group’s cultural-political views. The slowness allows the performance enough breathing space: time to follow the videos, to think about how they relate to the events, and time to imagine one’s own images – which in my case mostly had to do with what would or could happen next. The suspense of when the father might rape his children gripped me until the end.
After the performance, I shared my experience with my German colleague and performance artist Joy Harder. She said that the only two elements that she liked and could get involved in were Wicked Game from the epilogue (a scene that contained everything relevant to what the performance had to say about the sinister side of romantic love), and the cement mixer video (an association to the structures of social life, bourgeois privacy, the building of property, etc) - while the whole rest of the presentation/performance was, in her opinion, rather old-fashioned and condescendingly pedagogical. As I listened to Harder I felt the earth crumble below me… I already saw myself stuck on my own little island of time, shrinking into the shadows of the past, fast behind the mass audience, while Harder steams ahead towards embodiments of theatre which has stripped away all the traces of tradition which I still carry in my guts.
PROVOCATION, SOCIAL REACTION OR A REMEDY?
What did the performance want to say? A huge pressure to say something – or, as Harder put it, to teach something - could definitely be felt. According to the programme, the performance is about the cellar of romantic love; its opposite, darker side, and area where power and possession dwell. For me, romantic love is associated with a two-person relationship. If we speak of dominant images in our society, the first one that comes to mind is the love between a man (a father) and a woman (a mother). But this performance was about a family, or the love of a family ideal. Did the demo want to say that on its dark side, the matriarch is taken over by the children, or that the patriarch secretly wishes for a family without a matriarch? The two-floored stage setting made me think that the upper floor represented a romantic façade of this twisted family ideal, while the downstairs cellar played its opposite. I must be wrong, however, since life upstairs didn’t seem too romantic. Maybe the demo depicts the darker side exclusively, in which the family's everyday life (upstairs) is ruled by the Patriarch like a mad dictator, while in the cellar he becomes a victim of his tortured love, turning his children into scapegoats and the objects of his abuse. Maybe the dark side of our concept of romantic love could, at its worst, be something like this – any desire whatsoever could be seen as romantic, as a force to which one can only surrender, against one’s will and better knowledge.
Perhaps this flood of questions and answers is the intended reaction to this performance - or then the meaning was just unclear. Whatever the case, my own meaning-making was muddled by the mention of Joseph Fritzl’s name beforehand. I automatically read the performance as his family’s story – why else are some of the lines spoken in German? But looking over the programme more closely, I understood that it is about the Patriarch's, or Everyman's – or every father’s – journey into their own psychotic Unconscious. The concept of Everyman would have been easier to grasp if the Patriarch would have been more normal and colourless in his daily life upstairs. Jakob Öhrman’s Patriarch, grimacing in his bathrobe, was a spiteful caricature. Perhaps the father’s obviously unsympathetic character and the mention of Fritzl’s name was intended to increase the performance’s effect and shock value, and make it more media-sexy. Unfortunately this caused some haziness regarding the subject matter. But in itself, the characters’ lack of sympathy and evil natures appealed to me. The actors were very charismatic – and obscene. Outrageous people who do not evoke any goodness or noble-mindedness are always interesting and enticing on stage. This was true of the father, but especially of the spoiled and cruel children. Their special brand of evil, if one could call it that, was interesting. The victim is not just a ”victim” or a ”seducer” (from the Patriarch's point of view), but a human being who, locked away in a cellar, may be harbouring lowly thoughts and chilling forms of revenge. This made the children frightening and hurtful characters.
What else was obscene about Demo#1? The humour. Conte D’amour is similar to Institutet’s and Nya Rampen’s previous co-performance, Best of Dallas, a raunchy parody of the American television series. Still, I’m not sure who or what is being parodied in the demo. As already mentioned, telling Fritzl's story was beside the point, so he cannot be the object of parody. But who is, then? Could it be anyone else besides Everyman? This performance laughs at the audience, whose Unconscious is being played out. The message is: "Look in the mirror, you idiots! Know that you are sick in the head!"
BITTER PILL
This is probably the case. Institutet and Nya Rampen are full of hatred towards Nordic/Western/Capitalist indifference and it's not their intention to hide it. It’s hard to keep one's cool. One feels like shouting, ”you arrogant moralist assholes, who do you think you are!” And this is precisely the point of the game – its rock'n'roll attitude and a will to offend. In this case, offensiveness is more important than analysis. Conte D’amour is a provocation, a political act. This thought is supported by Carlsson’s article in the previous issue of Esitys -magazine (4/2009). He writes:”If the performance is only a social ailment and not a remedy, then I was right in hurting peoples’ feelings.” I can't understand half of all the civilized expressions in his article, but it plainly oozes with bitter disappointment… but over what, exactly? Everything?
Cynical. DEMO#1 was cynical, writes Joy Harder. She says that if one hates the theatre so much then one should refrain from saving it. That the demo’s analysis of the dark side of romantic love finally resulted in nothing but the self-centered and tame representation of an already existing set of associated structures and images. Harder also thinks that by using the traditional theatre methods and related power structures of "director-actor" and "performer-audience", the demo in fact reproduces the very hierarchical and subordinating structures that it claims to reject. I don’t know what power structures have been used in creating this performance, but I imagine that the group has been on very equal footing. I do agree with Harder in that the performance’s main ideologician does not step up, either during or after the performance, to answer the questions raised by the piece. Although I consider Conte D’amour DEMO#1 a political act, it lacks the will to answer the question, ”What then?”, or engage in discussion about it. In other words, the demo was not very constructive in relation to Carlsson’s hope of a remedy – instead, it is precisely a social ailment, a reaction - although it is in my opinion a very aesthetically intriguing and welcome one.
Text: Janne Saarakkala
Translation: Anna-Roosa Länsipuro
Sources:
Juha Hurme: Puupää, Kustannusyhtiö TEOS, 2009