The Titanic of Everyday Life

Strakstuk(Strak: tight, fixed, or firm; Stuk: piece, broken, plot, or hunk)Conceived, directed, and designed by Sjoerd WagenaarPerformers: Michael Beards, Bo Madvig, Jordi Cortès MolinaNear Utrecht, the Netherlands, 29 May 2003

The show is overthe audience gets upto leave their seats timeto collect their coats andgo home they turn aroundno more coats no more home.

(Vasili Rosanov, c. 1912)

The Frame

We strongly believe that performance art, whatever form it takes, will only be alive, interesting, saturated with the future when it's made in terms of the wish that Vasili Rosanov expresses in the lines just quoted-the wish to deprive each spectator of what she usually calls her own.

If one were to read this quotation as some kind of report about a war or an earthquake, it would probably come across as cruel and uncanny.

It might even be read as "funny" in the full sense of the word, where spectators all of a sudden feel they are in the wrong place at the wrong time, literally homeless, spaceless, and without orientation. Funny because the catastrophe they are experiencing close to the tips of their noses is only a coup de théatre, a trick, which juxtaposes things that don't belong together. The crevice that opens, revealing the foundations of the social world, is only a crack in the depiction of that world. An insight into a representation.

And, as in every really funny scene, a sad shadow darkens the picture, coming into sight at the very moment when spectators are no longer permitted to forget the catastrophe lurking in the laughter, a catastrophe that never really takes place. The curtain falls and life just goes on. So every serious-and that doesn't mean not funny-piece of art makes an outrageous claim: that it will bring to the fore the concealed grief referred to in the Rosanov poem we quoted at the start of this writing. That it will lift each spectator up from his seat, making him look at everyday life as something unfamiliar, something that is unknown and alien. The ambition of every serious piece of art is to change every spectator's perception, to change her life, yes, her world.

DasArts

DasArts is a school that is not really a school. DasArts offers training to "post-graduate artists," professional artists who have started to make their marks but who have not yet established themselves. It is a uniquely Netherlands venture at the present time, originally the invention of Ritsaert ten Cate, the longtime director of the Mickery experimental theatre of Amsterdam. The artists are homeless in a very literal sense because many of them come from different countries and remain at DasArts for two years. But even for the Dutch participants, DasArts is a foreign country. Part of the requirements is that the young artists separate from lovers, friends, and relatives in order to fully concentrate on their artistic development.

Moreover, the DasArts staff try their best to make the resident artists homeless in the conceptual sense by insisting that they throw away the keys to the familiar doors, to known strategies. At each phase of the training, the DasArts residents are questioned and challenged to change their perceptions of their lives, their attitudes toward themselves, toward art, and toward the world. At the same time, the DasArts mentors believe in the artists under their tutelage. The atmosphere at DasArts is both subversive and nurturing. A tall claim, admittedly, but one often borne out by the results, the works composed by DasArts students and graduates. Many participants in the DasArts program change their life's course, artistically speaking. They leave behind formerways of doing things, former arts even, and strike out in new directions.

Sjoerd Wagenaar is only one example of many who changed their career paths during their years at DasArts. Wagenaar came to DasArts as a fine artist and scenographer and left as a theatre director.

The Performance

A dreary suburb of Utrecht, the Netherlands. The houses are arranged like toy blocks, each one the...