INSTINCTIVE NEIGHBOURHOOD performed 02/09/2016 at Festival Best of the Fest in Eindhoven
Article by Anna van der Kruis – commissioned by Dans Brabant
The joy of speaking without foreknowledge
The afternoon following the premiere, I’m meeting with four dancers from the team of Guilherem Miotto’s Instinctive Neighbourhood in Pand P in Eindhoven. All four equally affable. Equally enthusiastic. I have no idea what they’re about to show me tonight and I like it that way. They are the experts, I am the lay person.
One lady steps away from the others. She has short, white hair and wears a died shirt in soft colours. Pink, purple, yellow. As she walks towards me, she raises one of her pale, naked arms high in the air, as if to show me that she’s happy to be chosen. But I don’t have to choose her: she chooses me. She joins me at the table and introduces herself as Julia. Within two minutes, I already forgot it, but she repeats her name without judging me. “Julia,” she says, immediately adding “just like the one from Shakespeare”.
Julia was born in 1940. She’s no longer living in Stratum, “but perhaps you shouldn’t write that down,” she says. She used to live here though, her entire childhood. It was a nice place, a real working-class neighbourhood. People were singing. “The horses head is against the wall, those kind of songs.” (I don’t recognize the phrase and a quick Google search comes up blank, but that suits Julia. I only find out later that she is a creative songwriter, once I’m in the audience.
“I have a serious heart condition,” she confides to me. “So all that moving around, it didn’t work. But I can sing. Gui is directing me: when to start and when to stop. And there’s a chair for me. It’s a diverse group,” she says: “the youngest member is twenty-six and the oldest eighty-three. And she’s fitter than I am! Gui is giving us all these phantasies. He might says, for instance: ‘Now dance like a little child that loves heavy metal music. And at some point you turn into an angry man, or a shaman.’ At first, I thought ‘what are we doing here?’ Re-di-cu-lous. This really isn’t my cup of tea, I should at least recognise something. When it comes to art works, I’m a-cultural. But Gui always gives you the feeling that it’s really beautiful what you’re doing. And he often gives you a hug.”
That very moment, he enters the room. “Hey there pal!” she shouts at him, and to me she says: “You see, that’s him.” Then they hug.
Jantine has been living in Stratum for ten years now. She has never been on stage before. “It’s special,” she says, “and emotional too, that there are people watching you.” At the same time she feels sustained. “The affection in the group is growing. The body speaks,” she says, “and the ego becomes silent. Thinking quiets down.”
She was very preoccupied with the structure at first, was still thinking about her shopping list. But now she is no longer afraid to move. She’s got the structure down. Her thoughts have become saturated. And the group has grown as well, they can trust each other now. They dare to follow their impulses, to seek each other out and make massive mistakes.
This morning, in the supermarket, she got into a conversation. Between the shelves, she just briefly talked about the project. Those people were curious to know things like, what is it you’re getting at? How do you express yourself? Simply stand there, she had replied, and go for it. “And the way that it differs for me or for Sjaan, who’s eighty-three, they find that fascinating.”
Babs is the next to join me. She is in her late seventies. She reminds me of my childhood, of the funny younger sister of my maternal grandmother. Small, fond of laughter. A roguish face with many little wrinkles – but in a Surinam version. She tells me that it had been hot in the theatre hall. “You know,” she says, “I was just like a sauna, really, every day. With those heavy black curtains. Do you realise that, for twelve days, we’ve had a free sauna every day?” That’s what she said to the group.
Just like Julia, Babs is not living in Stratum. She immediately throws it out in the open, but adds: “To be really honest, aren’t people the same everywhere, anyway? It’s universal. The feelings, the things you express. The way you express it is personal, but what you express is universal.” She already has quite a lot of stage experience, but there never was a rehearsal process like this one “This is new,” she says; “this man, he keeps on improvising. He never arrives at a clearly-defined plan. He also says: ‘It’s open-ended.’ It isn’t finished yet. You need to start understanding that at some point, and accept it.” Still, she did run into a personal boundary. “Listen here,” she had suggested: “we have to remember all the things you do. That is hard for us, to remember all of it.” And the next day, there had been a schedule.
When I ask her about the programme, because it contains a phrase that appealed to me – that Guilherme is convinced ‘that every body has a story to tell that is both personal and ego-less’ – she responds without a moment’s hesitation. “You soul is not personal. And it is the soul that you uncover. It is something bigger than the ego.”
The last person I talk to is Rob, he is the only man among twelve women. (The ladies have already gone upstairs. There was a lot of fuzz about a key. Who has it? Where has it gone?) Rob is in no hurry. “I only need to take off a shirt,” he says.
He has only been living in Stratum for one-and-a-half years. When he saw the call, he immediately applied. It was nearby and the call’s story appealed to him. “It’s a good story,” he says. “A story full of contrasts and contradictions. That makes it humorous. In general, that’s how it works.” To him, a book for instance is only funny if it also contains suffering. And he adds: “I also love to dance. But not the kind of dancing where you do specific steps. I just don’t get that.”
Stratum is very diverse, Rob says. Actually, the whole country is diverse, the whole city. When I ask him if he also has a lot of stage experience, like some of the others, he replies: “I was a teacher. I did perform a couple of times, with a band for example, but I guess the main thing is that I used to be a teacher. That’s where I lost a lot of inhibitions.”
And then, Rob also has to go upstairs. It is a quarter past six. Presently, at seven, the visitors will be at the door.
The show.
“Ik-kom uit As-per-ling, waar-mam-mie de-pijp uit-ging, waar-pap-pie zich ver-hing, waar-o-ma-de-baan-op-ging, en-o-pa-die kon-t-niet-aan, die-liet zich te-wa-ter-gaan, en-al-le-neef-jes-en nicht-jes, die gin-gen er-ach-ter-aan.”
(“I come from Asperling, where mummy kicked the bucket, where daddy hung from a rope, where granny sold her fanny, and grandad couldn’t cope, he slid into the water, and the nephews and nieces, they all went down that slope.”)
Julia is standing under a headlight that’s suspended from a string. All thirteen participants are standing under a lamp like this. But only the one over Julia, all the way to the left, is on. She’s singing. It’s an original murder ballad. Capricious lyrics and a capricious rhythm. All the participants are swaying, their attention turned inwards. Some wear sneakers with PVC soles that squeak on the ballet floor. A delicate, small woman with a rigid, dark bob and piercing eyes is striking out convulsively from her diaphragm and her shoulders. Her arms are lashing left and right. There’s a light tremor, a slight movement in her neck, her head. It could indicate a restless personality; perhaps even deep-rooted shame. Or discomfort. I recognise it. This woman might just as well be one of my aunts, or a sister. Actually most of the performers could be related to me. Another mise-en-scene is ruptured by loud volleys, like gunshots. A woman is slaloming and chattering through it all in fluent French. I catch phrases like: ‘C’est normal. On danse tout les jours. La dynamique du groupe. Ha! Ha! Eeeeehh, bonjour!’ And: ‘Du Stratuuum.’ There’s a song about Rottweilers and S&M. “Woof,” says Julia and the group changes position. “Woof.” And again. Next is a song in English, a harmony.
“Hồ Chí Minh is a son of a bitch.
I’m gonna kill him and his kids.
I don’t know, but I’ve been told
Eskimo-pussy is mighty cold
Give me some – give me some”
This summer I saw a fragment on tv from the work of Alain Platel. He was making a performance with transsexuals and crossdressing actors. Vulnerable, older men who become women on stage, who are being seen, literally, and flourish. With lots of makeup and grand gestures. (The exact opposite, with regard to the form, from what we get to see tonight.) The show became a hit. He toured the entire world. Somehow, in this cacophony of Guilherme, something similar seems to happen.
Thirteen people from in and around Stratum are given a voice. They show themselves. And even though at times I can’t get my head around the things they are doing, intuitively I do get it. They seem to have found something. They are very quiet in their movements and they look as if they know exactly what they’re doing. As if they know exactly what they want to tell us. What they want to give us.
Rob is frond and centre, he’s moving mechanically, like a Duracell rabbit. Everyone’s wobbling their knees. And there’s the squeaking of sneakers again. TL lights above the thirteen performers are switched on. They all look straight ahead, except for the woman who had been chattering in French before. She is looking at the audience, smiling a Colgate smile.
Then the whole group starts to shout. As if it’s a holiday camp, or a Carnival Sunday. Yelling, exhilarated. Loud, to get above a mash-up of strings and cymbals. “Samenzijn… Is samen lachen… Samen huilen…”
They end up on the floor to the right, their backs against the wall. Like little girls and one little boy, they low-five each other. Someone different to each side. The fragile woman with the rigid, dark bob is laughing: also like a little girl.
And then we’re back to where we started, with the threatening pulse from the beginning. Everyone’s facing the audience, each under a new, individual light that’s burning softly and gradually dies. The applause is generous. When it’s over, I overhear one person cautiously saying: “I didn’t have a clue. It was a kind of Biodanza…” And someone else, a little louder: “We will just dance on, right?”