Strategic subversions of common coping during Beyond the Black Box

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.