The public becomes the performer in unique stage show
A touring social experiment by Antwerp choreographer Jan Martens is coming to the capital, where it asks untrained residents to put themselves on stage with a mystery co-star
Close encounters
The Antwerp choreographer has always had a penchant for reality and intimacy. See his intense duet Sweat Baby Sweat or The Dog Days Are Over, a physical battle of attrition. But now he’s taking it to another level, opening the stage to “ordinary” people with no formal dance education.
“The need for slower, less artificial communication is greater than ever in these hurried, virtual times,” Martens says. With The Common People he is tackling the zeitgeist.
In every city – from Antwerp to Nieuwpoort – that he and fellow director Lukas Dhondt visit, they set up a series of workshops introducing about 45 residents to techniques that help them create more intimate, one-on-one encounters.
All these people are being prepared for an evening in which they will perform a duet with someone they’ve never met before – someone who has taken the same workshops at a different time – putting their new skills into practice in front of an audience.
‘Very exciting’
“Two hours before their performance I give them a script with a list of actions, variations on what we practised in the workshops,” Martens explains. “So all the participants have an idea of what they have to do, but they don’t have a clue who they will be doing it with. It could be with a 16-year-old boy or an 80-year-old woman.”
“It’s all very exciting,” says Sander Heyvaert, a 23-year-old who took part in Leuven, where the project visited earlier this month. “Though we don’t know who will be in front of us, we did get a lot of practice in how to respect the other person’s personal space, so no one has to feel awkward.”
The most rewarding encounters are those in which two very different people find a common language
The three workshops were pretty intense, he adds. “By taking us out of our comfort zone, that zone starts to get bigger, and, eventually, you feel more open and comfortable with physical contact.”
Elke Horemans, 48, a fellow participant in the Leuven workshops, partly agrees. But for her, the physical exercises were easier in the first workshop, when she didn’t know the person who was in front of her.
“In the second workshop we introduced ourselves and had to talk about our use of social media,” she says. She learned that a lawyer and a representative from a major company were in her group, dispelling some of the clichés in her head.
“But at the same time, physical contact became a bit more difficult, since now there was also a mental connection.”
Surprising results
For Martens the diversity of the groups was crucial. “When we matched the participants for their blind dates, we made sure these pairings had a wide variety,” he explains.
He put together couples of varying age, gender and social backgrounds to keep the encounters as diverse and interesting as possible. But he soon learned that his ideas of which stage encounters might cause abrasion and which would be harmonious often clashed with the reality.
“In half of the cases we were wrong,” he says. “In fact, the most rewarding encounters are those in which two very different people find a common language.”
In brief, that’s also the goal of the entire project. “Since polarisation is everywhere, we thought it was important to do this social experiment now,” Martens explains. “People find it difficult to put themselves in someone else’s shoes. Instead, they keep on shouting their own convictions. In a time where there are plenty of channels where you can do that, especially on social media, people aren’t looking for a common language anymore.”
Making a difference
The Common People tries to make a difference on a small scale. As well as the performance stage, there is an installation room where participants leave their smartphones, with their passwords and the suggestion to take selfies, confronting the audience with privacy issues.
“It puts the visitor in the role of a voyeur,” says Horemans. “Maybe it leads to the realisation that what they are being asked to do isn’t 100% OK.”
Travelling with this project through cities in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and France, Martens was confronted with different cultural and social city dynamics. “In Marseille, people were more open than in Belgium or Germany,” he says. “First encounters were warmer there. People started laughing and talking, while in Antwerp or Düsseldorf they just went to sit on their chairs.”
On the other hand, he was delighted that in Antwerp he could welcome a few women over 75, some of them with reduced mobility, as well as three young Syrian asylum-seekers. “It not only changed the group dynamics, it also established awareness, which is crucial in projects like this.”
19 April, Les Brigittines, Korte Brigittinenstraat, Brussels; 22 April, Beursschouwburg, A Ortsstraat 20-28, Brussels
Photo: Katja Illner
