Bloody theater of Julian Hetzel: how ‘right’ the entrails of ‘left’ through the sausage machine

It goes bloody Three Times Left is RightThe new performance of Julian Hetzel who experienced the Dutch premiere last Thursday at Spring Performing Arts Festival in Utrecht. During the act of love, a man is stripped of his guts by his beloved. Like a party garland, his intestines are dangling around his neck. The man does not resist, only moans a little while he is looking in a fake blood puddle how his organ meat is pulled through a meat mill, is pressed into a sausage machine and is thrown into a pan.

This is the pleasantly disturbed way in which artist and theater maker Julian depicts ‘cultural cannibalism’, in other words, in this case: how the left idiom is taken over, processed, distorted by the right, and is served in that new consistency for their own business. For example, it may happen that conservative speakers call for ‘revolution’. That they fist balls against oppression and exclusion, against the expressation of what they frame as progressive ideas. It is the idiom from the left, personally pressed to sausage by right.

The man is played by Josse de Pauw, the woman by Kristien de Cheboost. Spiernakt appears the two Flemish actors (also in reality partners) at the start of the performance for us, only a harness for the channel for the shoulders. In English (the entire performance is in English) they explain to whom their roles are based: his on cultural scientist Helmut Lethen, a progressive thinker, and hers on his wife Caroline Sommerfeld, who has extreme right -wing ideas. Despite clashing ideologies, the German couple raised three children together.

The peacock and the cheers have made empathy their profession, they say; In essence, acting is nothing but empathizing with the motives of another. They are therefore planning to apply that here. Especially for the cheers, that promises to be a challenge, because Sommerfeld’s conservative ideas is not exactly hers.

Meat plea for democracy

That’s what it’s about Three Times Left is Right: how you can relate – in a relationship, but also in society – as views that are not yours. Are you going to defend it? Can contrasting visions co -exist peacefully? Perhaps people automatically join the prevailing ideology in the area? What if it clashes with your personal views? Can you get used to statements and actions that go directly to your personal values? Can you normally find what you don’t want to find normal, as long as you are exposed to it often enough? More concrete: how could the Holocaust take place? How can it be explained that people with a healthy dose of empathy do not come into protest when genocide is committed just in front of them?

They are important questions, and in theory it is fascinating to investigate how the clash of ideologies takes place on a small scale with this intellectual love couple; In a sense, the two form a meat plea for democracy. But to really come to surprising thoughts, both thinkers should have been taken more seriously. Lethens College, for example, about how our frame of reference tends to adapt to the prevailing standards and thus always normalizes new circumstances, remains quite on the surface, although De Pauw does bring the text as if he debits groundbreaking insights. Sommerfeld’s concern about ‘mass immigration’ and ‘language police’ will not be tangible for a moment, despite all intentions on empathy.

The sharpest criticism of the left is in mind Three Times Left is Right not put in the mouth of Sommerfeld, but, surprisingly, comes from the Zel itself, who starts the performance with a seemingly endless list Trigger Warnings. Taking into account with other people’s feelings you can also exaggerate, he seems to want to say. Would it?

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