One of the most beautiful performances I ever saw was one by Dries Verhoeven. In a live streaming (2010) you and nineteen other visitors took place in a kind of glass trailer. Sitting behind a desktop, you ended up in a live chat with a Sri Lankan interlocutor, who himself was sitting on a beach 8,000 kilometers away. This created an intimate conversation in which empathy became central.
The great thing, however, is that Verhoeven did not opt for easy sentiment. As the bond between you and your interlocutor grew, for example by discussing loss and grief together, a sense of manipulation crept into the performance. The performer asked for your address details, and eventually for money, breaking through the reassuring fantasy of equality.
I often thought of that performance Dear beloved friend, the new work by Verhoeven that premiered last Saturday. Just like in live streaming, the audience is in live connection with another country: in this case a video stream from Lagos, Nigeria. In ITA’s main hall, we see images of the city at night on the big screen as we drive through the deserted streets of a suburb. Then the camera zooms out and we appear to be looking at a screen within the screen. In a film studio we meet the Nigerian cast and crew who are working on the performance. Gradually, however, they reverse the viewing direction: a camera on the ITA stage watches the audience, and the players look at us in turn.
Read also: In this performance, visitors lie alone in bed in their own hotel room
Prejudices
Watching and being watched: it is the most important common thread in Verhoeven’s work. Like no other Dutch theater maker, he confronts his audience with their own prejudices by making them aware of (the limitations of) their own gaze. In the performance that put him on the map, You are here, as a visitor you end up in a small room, where you are on your own – until the mirrored ceiling suddenly rises and offers you a view of all the other rooms that surround you. In 2007, the work was already a sharp reflection on the individualism of urban life, but it acquired an extra layer of tragic meaning when it was revived in 2020, in the middle of the corona crisis.
In later performances, Verhoeven continued to thematise the view of ‘the other’. That also often caused enough controversy. In Ceci n’est pas… (2013) Verhoeven placed performers in a glass cage in the public space, as part of a series of images specifically aimed at discussing social prejudices, such as a trans person, a naked elderly woman, a naked man carrying a child reading aloud in underwear, and a black man in chains. It certainly resulted in fascinating conversations, but the perspective itself was not problematized, so that ‘the other’ was still reduced to a passive object.
In Dear beloved friend Verhoeven continues to struggle with the balance of power between his performers and the audience that watches them – and by extension, the balance of power between Europe and Africa. Throughout the performance, we hear a voice-over describing the life of any European. He watches the news, looks at his smartphone and continues to mess around. Worried about the world but getting no further than charitable donations, he has a recurring nightmare about a party where he doesn’t recognize anyone. This creates a critical portrait of the decadence, hypocrisy and nightmares of the Westerner.
Reversal
It is an interesting approach: instead of us Westerners watching a performance about the life of Nigerians, they tell about our lives, so that we ourselves become the object of the performance. In the film studio, some of the performers wear the mask of an old white man, completing the reversal.
Unfortunately, this one-sided approach is also its weak point Dear beloved friend. The satirical text is too superficial to offer new insights into our own behavior or thinking, nor does it generate ideas about contemporary Nigeria. The contrast between the European doom and gloom and the Nigerian optimism for the future, which is briefly touched upon in the performance, is thus in no way deepened.
The performance thus gets stuck in a provocation that is consistently thought through, but ultimately turns out to be one-dimensional. It’s missing Dear beloved friend especially the two-way traffic that characterizes Verhoeven’s best work; the true encounter with ‘the other’ does not materialize in this case.