By Kester Freriks
03.09.2003 / NRC Handelsblad
Non theatre full of small sounds and experiments
That is what small boys dream about: to become an inventer, a young scientist, if needed Willy Wortel.
Yesterday the Festival De internationale Keuze opened in Rotterdam.
On the initiative of the Rotterdamse Schouwburg prominent, national and international theatre makers bring new theatre. Directors and performers are young and don’t work with the ‘iron repertoire’ but are focused on the merging of disciplines.(....)
(...) From Switzerland the performance ‘Physik’, presented by a group who calls itself Hygiene Heute.
Two actors, Karl Braunschwaiger and Amadeus Kronheim, amuse themselves and the audience with technical toys. They let dance a ping pong ball (table tennis ball??) on a hairdryer, showing what is gravity and measure the temperature in the auditorium at the beginning and the end of the evening. Kronheim says he has lost ‘half a kilo’ after playing the performance (and it is already such a thin man) and the more extended Bruckschwaiger is calculating how many calories the performance takes of him.
The most inviting remark in this performance is ‘that this performance has got nothing to do with theatre’. That is right. The actors are no actors, they are more something like the laboratory attendant at high school, such a man in dust coat with glasses, assisting the chemistry samples. The carbide always exploded, a lot of smoke.
The actors reach their goal, despite their slight geniality/joviality. They try to explain the world enigma. Why does gravity exist at all? Why can human beings not float like angels? And of course the essence: Why do people ask themselves questions? In the set which is like a laboratory, full with machineries and windmachines, they explain. Indeed they do not have anything to do with being an actor and say: ‘we do not act because we don’t have pretentions’. That coincides their vision of the anti-actor. Although I am not really of the science side still it is wonderful to see those young boys with their inventors’ stuff and playing boxes. They make a zeppelin flying through the theatre space. The zeppelin lands on the spot they want it to land. Beautiful. That is how light theatre can be.