SoAP

Seen Feb. 1, 2023, Beyond the Black Box, Royal Waiting Room Amsterdam Central. By Fransien van der Putt

Beyond the Black Box opened this week with SoAP-er Rita Hoofwijk’s presentation in the royal waiting room at Amsterdam Central Station. She launched there Jean.live, a website that plays with the way the central clock time, regulated time, determines our lives and invites us to suspend that control for the duration of a train ride.

The app is announced by NS on its internal information screens. I encounter mostly cancelled trains and screens, which in itself, of course, makes for deprivation as you indulge in the delays. Then I dream away and only check the app at home.

During the opening, Hoofwijk explained how she was inspired by the fact that in the nineteenth century central (Amsterdam) time was not established in the Netherlands until the introduction of the train. Before that, the conductor simply adjusted his watch at each station. Until then, the time was measured by the position of the sun, and was thus slightly different at each church or town hall.

Hoofwijk is also inspired by Jean Tinguely, the zero-artist we know from the little machines and machinery in museums and squares, who wrote a pamphlet in 1959 about being in time, moving with the flux, with the noise, by forgetting minutes and hours. Hoofwijk tells how in preparation she taped off the clocks on her devices and had a different life: she was never late, she could tell by the light what time of day it was, or by the behavior of the neighbors that it was probably dinner time, at least for them. She herself ate when she felt like it and slept as much as she wanted.

The app tries to entice the traveler during the trip to leave the screen the screen and dream away, looking around, making up stories with people you haven’t met and never will. I can’t manage to set up a full-screen display on my phone, so I look on my laptop. Using simple means, programmer Ehud Neuhaus and designer Yvonne van Versendaal have assembled a sequence of poetic gestures with Hoofwijk. Originally a dreamer, I think it will take little effort for me to accept Hoofwijk’s invitation on the train, not to work, not to read, not to append, just that little black screen in your hand, where real time becomes a dot in the dark, with no horizon, with the only orientation being your own representation of time.

Aside from asking a few questions, the app mostly evokes a different perspective and emphasizes the here and now of the journey, the people, the train. I’m very curious to see if and how people will take advantage of this de-stressing and physical awareness during their trip. The app or website excels in simplicity, omits any kind of spectacle. Is that just enough little to encourage less screen behavior?

February 4, 2023 by Fransien van der Putt

Much of the work at festival Beyond The Black Box in Amsterdam seeks to make spectators aware of ingrained patterns of intercourse and perception. Taking more time, feeling your own body in the sensation of others, realizing how your gaze is directed and by whom or by what.

In addition to Jean of Rita Hoofwijk, MOHA (Alice Pons, Olivia Reschofsky), lifts visitors over the threshold of De Brakke Grond and offers a delicious dinner where you are blindfolded. Eating and conversing in small groups with hands and ears is terribly interesting. When I take off my blindfold after dining it’s striking how slowly my brain switches back and my brain reacts almost overexcited, not at all keen on all the visual information it suddenly has to process again

But coming in blindfolded, being seated at the table and eating also has a social or even political dimension. Can you indulge in a conversation with people whose status and position, appearance and behavior you cannot immediately read off? When you introduce yourself to each other, what do you say? How do you interact with each other when you have no idea yet who you are interacting with?

Some confusion arises because at the opening of the dinner a task is given in English, which is not understandable for everyone, to reflect on life and work in the year 2090. It distracts somewhat from what conversation had already developed at the table, but in the confusion that follows, it immediately becomes clear how interesting a conversation is between people who don’t see each other but can hear and feel each other, help each other pour glasses of water and figure out how to do this together now.

Also Robbert&Frank Frank &Robbert is concerned with setting up a collective experience is a wondrous ritual for eight people around a fake campfire. Or actually it is not a ritual (for such a form has to grow over a long period of time) but a party game that refers to all kinds of aspects of storytelling and sharing experiences around a campfire. To this end, in keeping with their previous work, Robbert&Frank Frank&Robbert has dabbled in all kinds of social and religious traditions and put together a sequence of actions that the eight visitors go through together in forty minutes.

In my little group there are four twenty-somethings (I think art students) who immediately set to work with the matches, a candle and the wooden logs, which I don’t think are at all ready to be lit, so that from the beginning of the séance all sorts of things are mixed up. Behind a curtain in a small room at De Brakke Grond, you can hear Robbert&Frank Frank&Robbert doing the controls of playing tapes or hoisting a chain of amulets, but they are conspicuously absent.

The I Ching plays a role and through chance I am assigned the role of mother and earth. How the others fare, I do not know, because in some sections everyone is addressed individually through headphones. Finally, sitting in a circle on minicule wooden benches around a pile of shimmering black grit, we all tell each other a personal story based on the hexagram assigned to us. We then gaze for the second time into the crackling light of eight flaming XXL stars, which simulate the campfire but, in constantly lighting and letting it burn up, also give a nice rhythm to the gathering.

Finally, we are asked to collectively leave something behind for the next generation. It is remarkable how fast the working together goes and how earnest and pleasant everyone is with each other. Inventing the order of things and the anarchism of youth go extremely well together.

Robbert&Frank Frank&Robbert name it explicitly: that with Fire they would like to make a collective of us, or at least give us a collective experience. Those are two completely different things, of course, but it’s incredible how calmly and respectfully these eight find each other without doing too much, let alone negotiating.

Both MOHA’s dinner and Frank&Robbert Robbert&Frank’s ritual are strategic subversions of common intercourse, without imposing too much explicit content or meaning. Both proposals can almost be called radical in the precise way in which politeness and friendliness, etiquette and ritual are combined with openness and the invitation to do something together. It seems almost nothing, or perhaps even silly to some, but the feigned innocence of the proposals is extraordinarily effective.

Seen on Feb. 3, 2023, Beyond The Black Box, De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam. By Gina Miroula

It can feel so good when you explore boundaries together, stretch them. In love. With a partner. Or lying under your lover or mistress you’ve been doing it with for a year. But how does that actually work with colleagues, acquaintances and strangers? What distance can you bridge and what especially creates discomfort? Proxemics by theater maker Salomé Mooij is an exercise in closeness and part of festival Beyond the Black Box.

The audience is scattered throughout the theater, both on the benches and on the playing floor. From the ridge of the auditorium a voice sounds. “I am now at the furthest point. Salomé Mooij does not have to raise her voice to reach the auditorium. Still, she feels too far away to make full contact.

Mooij shines a laser rangefinder on the floor. The red point of light jumps back and forth among the audience, circling across the floor. She was inspired by American anthropologist Edward T. Hall, who made a study of the distances people keep from one another. Slowly, she moves down through the balconies, gets a little closer.

At public events, the distance between listeners and speakers is usually eight meters, she says. Listeners cannot see the speakers’ eyes; expression must be magnified, through gestures or the blinking of eyes. The person speaking knows nothing about the people being spoken to. ‘Reaction from the listeners is neither necessary nor desired,’ Mooij says.

Other anecdotes about distance and proximity follow. Like the two-meter rule, the social distance: just too far to have a sincere conversation. Or the dominant boundary (standing above someone) and the distance of working together, after which Mooij produces a series of affirmative sounds: “Hmm, really, yeah. Regularly, she interacts with the audience. She jumps into the arms of an unfamiliar gentleman, dives into the neck of a lady with long blond hair. Close by, Mooij names the visibility of her pores, how you hear and smell someone’s breath, feel body heat. “It’s the distance of making love and fighting. It produces an intimate scene that feels strangely uncomfortable. Mooij stretches her exercise in closeness effortlessly.

Proxemics is a strongly designed performance at the intersection of performance and artistic research. The climax arrives when the music comes on, the saxophone sounds in “Poetry: How Does it Feel?” by Akua Naru sounding from the speakers. With arms wide, circling like helicopter blades, Mooij moves dreamily, almost floating, through the space. In doing so, she proves herself a master of probing desire.