Fortunately, man has Anthropocene, the musical two jellyfish to fall back on. They pep him up, if he doesn’t like it anymore. It’s not nothing either: the feeler fish and the mosaic-tailed rat are dying out before his eyes; the Baobab tree and the coral herald their end. And to think that man himself is responsible for that. The sea creatures quickly start a cheerful tune.
Performance collective Club Gewalt allows one person (Amir Vahidi) with a cap and huge backpack to represent all of humanity, which is confronted with the climate crisis. A dyke breaks, the ocean (Loulou Hameleers) demands more and more land and nature admonishes people. What will he do to stop this ecological disaster? Or is it actually too late?
Also read: ‘Club Gewalt tackles climate depression with a musical’
The ‘Anthropocene’ from the title is the possible name for the era in which we now live: a period in which humanity has great influence on planet Earth. Author Anne van de Wetering dives deep into this matter. The performance is a tsunami of scientific theories and English terms, but the story remains intact and many perspectives are given space: from the history of the world and extinction species to the ‘hockey stick curve’, which depicts global warming.
Directed by Sanna Vrij, the scenes are a piece of cake. Players drag smoke or wind machines across the stage and help each other in outfits. These are striking costumes, designed by Bas Koster. He gave the jellyfish (Gerty Van de Perre and Lucas Schilperoort) trendy sunglasses and cowboy hats, the volcano a suit with wild red-orange prints and the dress of the ocean fans out in wavy strips.
Electronic Experiment
In Anthropocene (mostly comical) choreographies trigger the traditional musical feeling, but the music doesn’t immediately remind you of that. Composers Amir Vahidi and Robbert Klein mixed musical-esque outbursts with complex electronic compositions. They were inspired by ‘hyperpop’, a young music genre that embraces the boundlessness of the internet. In this, man and machine are not opposed to each other, but become one. This is apparent, for example, from the frequent use of auto-tune-like techniques: a technological gimmick with which singers distort their voice or polish out vocal irregularities. Anthropocene is full of such effects. For example, the jellyfish sounds as if they are singing underwater.
Every scene has its own sound. In the opening number, an even more traditional musical sound reverberates, while people applaud ‘his’ waterworks and agriculture. Later, the earth (Suzanne Kipping) sings about its history in a long show number and man collides with nature in a rough duet. The multitude of musical twists and turns makes the performance somewhat inaccessible, especially because at times the experiment takes you far and lasts for a long time. Nevertheless, Club Gewalt pushes you against the facts. The collective blasts off the stage (so loud that you sometimes literally fear for your eardrums) and this climate musical will certainly be in your head for a while.