Grote Hoop / Berg

Proposition 1: Reanimation (solo by Miet Warlop)

Proposition 2: Reconstruction (solo by Miet Warlop accompanied by a witness)

You might have witnessed it coming home after a terrible day: towering piles of unwashed cups and dishes decorated with steel gargoyles – forks, spoons and knives – forming a formidable kitchen mess cathedral. This disposition of matter caused you a sudden anguish. An inner twilight zone opened up, filled with a sad sense of doom mixed with the hope things could be different or would be eventually. “How did it come to this?” you asked.

In Big Heap/Mountain Miet Warlop proposes a particular form of ballistics and forensics to answer to this question. She probes the limits of our imagination with a small arsenal of everyday objects and confronts us with how much we fabricate belief all the time in our struggles with reality. Her answer might be “we just can’t help ourselves” but she feels that this is not only funny but grand too.

The first proposition Reanimation is a 40-minute slow-motion instant replay of a sixty-second murder scene. A sequence of careful manipulations allows for the flat characters – made up only of clothes – to spring into life conveying a sensuous world of articulate emotions. As the drama unfolds, minimal adjustments suffice to raise the tension until the irrevocable has happened.

The performer puts the “imagined others” in the first proposition at risk through the delicate procedure of the autopsy of a crime event. In the second proposition Reconstruction, it is the performer who takes all the chances in a frenetically accelerating obstacle race. In this performance, cascading sweeps of actions – failed or successful – build up and destroy a succession of symbolically laden scenes.

Both performances have no liturgical inclination – no theory or world-view underlies the action – and are rituals in the purest sense: structuring experiences and memory thoroughly by accessing only the simplest objects to achieve a certain form of peace. The performances do not seek closure – which would be telling stories again – but something very different, a mystical awareness maybe. (Pierre De Gelder)