Visually spectacular journey to a parallel universe with theater duo BVDS

taketonews

During the corona pandemic, the extremely popular ‘reality shift community‘. Girls from all over the world tried (and are trying, because the craze still exists) to transport themselves from their teenage bedrooms to a parallel universe. There are guides online on how to shift to Hogwarts as a Harry Potter fan. There is a fanatic shift to the past, to the game Minecraftto TV program South Park.

How it works: to start, you describe in a script how you use DR (je desired reality, desired reality) looks exactly. Then, with the help of repetitive music and meditation techniques, you enter a half-awake, half-dreaming state, a so-called ‘transliminal experience‘, where the boundaries between dream and reality seem to blur somewhat. And in that state between waking and sleeping, you then enter your DR.

Theater makers Suzan Boogaerdt and Bianca van der Schoot (BVDS) also wanted to try this out. In the theater series Rooms for Transformation the duo has often experimented with shaping alternative realities, in order to achieve a new, more hopeful perspective on the future.

Also read an interview with theater makers Boogaerdt and Van der Schoot: ‘How do you turn spectators into participants?’

Clay tablets

In the latest performance within that series, Underworlds, a gateway experience, BVDS uses the techniques of the reality shift community to enter a DR together with their audience. They based the script on the myth of Psyche and Erosa story by Apuleius from the second century AD that (as a voice-over informs us in broken English) can be understood as a metaphor for human development.

Four masked performers in bright neon-colored costumes recite a repeating text (from clay tablets from 2000 BC, we read in the program), while one of them sounds a gong and incense spreads through the room.

During this initial ritual, the guttural sounds are still funny – but then BVDS builds up the composition of images, sounds and texts so cleverly and musically that the narrative gradually becomes more and more compelling.

Scene from the performance Underworlds, a gateway experience by theater makers Boogaerdt and Van der Schoot. Photo Birgit Hupfeld
Scene from the performance Underworlds, a gateway experience by theater makers Boogaerdt and Van der Schoot. Photo Birgit Hupfeld

Antiques and camp

Visual Underworlds, a gateway experience a spectacle piece, the design is beautiful. Lotte Goos’ costumes and sculptures – candy pink masks with satyr horns, creepy bird heads, third eyes and soda cans – are an alienating combination of antique and camp; Video maker Mikko Gaestel expands on this and shows the mythological Psyche running around on a large screen in a 3D video game.

There are references to the TikTok community (internet forums, chatbots, ring lightssmartphones, that video game), to mythological figures (the three Fates, with their spinning wheel and measuring stick busy with Psyche’s life thread), to Alice in Wonderland (smoking caterpillar), snakes, eggs, old women – there is so much to see and understand that one visit to the performance is actually not enough.

Peppered with this spectacular imagery, the script unravels little by little about Psyche, who must descend to the underworld to win back the love god Eros. Unlike the traditional hero, who tends to come to blows with a dragon, this heroine in BVDS’s interpretation mainly lives in a waiting room.

This again: an intermediate space, one liminal space. Not one, and not the other. Ultimately, that is the core of the desired reality of BVDS: Underworlds takes the audience to a world where binary opposites can be thrown out the window and where the metaphorical dragon is allowed to continue to live.

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