Hotel Modern are the sort of theater company whose search for an unusual way to tell stories seems to have been rather successful. At first sight, the set looks like a huge, interactive art installation. But as the performers enter, this set begins to spring to life in a way that is as surprising as it is enchanting.
The Rotterdam-based company consists of Arnhem Theater School graduates Arlène Hoornweg and Pauline Kalker, and visual artist, model maker and performer, Herman Helle. Composer Arthur Sauer often collaborates with the group, and Shrimp Tales is one of these occasions.
Everything about this performance reflects a company who approach their work with dedication, meticulous hard work and a constant search for new and experimental art forms. Perhaps more importantly, you also get the feeling that they all love what they do.
The set is a huge, complex mess of tables covered with props, machinery of various sorts, and…shrimps. Hundreds and hundreds of them. A few cameras lie scattered around and really, it’s hard to imagine how any intelligible performance could come out of all this.
But it does. Because the tables are actually miniature film sets which, when cameras are pointed at them, bring the shrimps and their impressively crafted tiny little worlds into focus, and the mass of confusion begins to have meaning. I imagine this is how aliens feel when they look down at our world from their spaceships.
Although actually, I think ‘aliens’ is the wrong word here. Because what we’re really watching, is shrimp versions of ourselves. This particular performance style lends itself well to playing with the alien-self complex. Hotel Modern contemplate their ‘subjects’ with a mixture of love and hate, empathy and disdain – according to them, Shrimp Tales is a study of the “fascinating plague that calls itself mankind.” Sounds about right.
The title Shrimp Tales is a good first indicator to what this show is all about – we do not follow a day in the life, or solve conflicts of one character. Instead, we encounter what the creators themselves term ‘a whole new universe’ – new, but familiar. With the help of various different media, the audience is transported to a whole, complex, multi-dimensional universe.
This is not the sort of minimalist art that scrutinizes one piece of truth, or the essence of one meaning. Instead, Hotel Modern seek to create life as it is – complex, full of layers of meaning, totally arbitrary and mostly absurd.