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January 22, 2010
A view of the unimaginable
KAMP offers a harsh reality and possibilities for solace.
BASYA LAYE
Is it possible to depict the horrors of the Holocaust on stage? What about the violence and terror of Auschwitz – the reality of individual prisoners awaiting their fate in the Nazi death factory? The members of Amsterdam-based theatre group Hotel Modern has attempted to do just that – bring the unimaginable to life.
Conceived and created in 2005, KAMP sees the stage set with an enormous scale model of Auschwitz, replete with thousands of eight-centimetre-tall hand-made puppets, representing the prisoners and their killers. There are overcrowded barracks, a railway track, barbed wire, a crematorium and a gateway that proclaims “Arbeit Macht Frei.” Blending visual art, puppetry and film, the actors in KAMP stay entirely silent throughout, but they move through the landscape with miniature cameras, filming the events as they unfold, projecting the images onto screens.
The Independent spoke with Pauline Kalker, actor and co-creator of KAMP, and co-founder of Hotel Modern, while she was on tour on the east coast of the United States with The Great War, another of her company’s productions.
Describing the genesis of KAMP and the idea to use puppets in their productions, Kalker said, “Hotel Modern is a small theatre company and it was founded by me and another actress, Arlène Hoornweg. We both have a background as actresses, we went to theatre school in the Netherlands ... but we were both interested in other art forms, like visual art and music. A year later, my partner, Werner Heller, he’s a visual artist, joined the company. As a visual artist, he was making money by making models for architecture, for city planners, and he makes very artistic, expressive, special, original models. I got the idea of working together with him to use models and theatre.”
Kalker believes the puppets have an unusual impact on theatre-goers. Even though the actors are silent, Kalker said, there is a recorded “soundscape, but it’s wind or machine-like sounds, like a death factory, industrial sounds, also sometimes breathing, a train coming in. But ... the puppets, I think people identify with them. They are kind of abstract but they are kind of expressive, people can identify with them – the heads are all made by visual artists – they all have a different face, so they all have their own individual expressions.”
Without words, the performance is taut and stark, presenting a visual record of the daily drudgery of camp existence and the extraordinary facts of mass murder. In their visual representation, Kalker and her co-creators wanted to lay bare the facts of what happened at Auschwitz, providing a “macro-perspective,” and avoid overlaying emotions on the reality of the enormity.
Theatre-goers have diverse reactions to the performance. “Sometimes people are shocked because they [just] witnessed what happened in those camps, which is, of course, a shocking experience,” explained Kalker. “Some people are sad, of course, which is the emotion to feel about such an event. But sometimes people are not so touched because we show it in a kind of distant way. There are no story lines, no one character that you follow or something, it’s a bit like war journalism – we try to just show what happens and not make it more sentimental – you don’t hear screaming or dogs barking, it’s a bit abstract.
“We didn’t want to hide an effect ... but of course it’s very different if you show a puppet of a dead body or a picture of a real dead body,” admitted Kalker. “For some people ... they’ve seen a lot of movies and read books about the Holocaust [but] in our show they got close to what happened because they see it happening in front of their eyes. People said they feel powerless because they see it happening on stage, like 20 metres or 10 metres close, and they feel powerless – they want to say ‘stop this,’ but they can’t. They’re a witness and I think that’s a good thing.”
Promotional materials explain the group’s artistic motivations further: “Hotel Modern are idealistic in the sense that they believe the watching and experiencing of theatre can encourage reconciliation. They attempt to offer solace to a society and a world in which people sometimes seem fearful of one another. This consolation is not achieved by creating a saccharine performance, but by representing harsh reality in a refined, poetic manner.”
It took seven months to research and develop KAMP. Kalker has a personal connection to the Holocaust and to Auschwitz, and part of the research involved visiting the site of her grandfather’s murder. “My grandfather was killed in Auschwitz, so that was the reason for me to want to deal with that theme in my theatre work. We already made a performance about the First World War, which we are performing now, telling the story of the soldiers who fought in the trenches and, in that show, for the first time, we worked with the combination of models and cameras on stage.”
The members of Hotel Modern also consulted with Holocaust survivors while creating the piece, which was particularly important to Kalker. “We chose to talk to survivors because my father’s cousin was in the camps but I never had the courage to ask him about it. And also some other family members, an aunt actually, she was in a camp, but I never asked her about it. It’s not something you bring up easily, you don’t want to get people in that memory. The process of making the show was also an excuse and also a kind of deadline to talk to them about this subject, and that was very important for me personally, part of making the show.”
Kalker described meeting some survivors of Auschwitz in Holland. “It was very, for me, it was always a grim fairy tale – like my grandfather vanished far away but I could always feel my father’s sadness about losing his father, and I was always also sad about that. So talking to these survivors, who were there, in that place when that happened, was a good experience. It also helped, it gave us permission, because we were a bit afraid – we didn’t want to steal somebody’s story. I really wanted the permission of the survivors to do the show, so we asked them and, when we made the models, we brought them to our studio and we asked them what they thought about the project. If they would have said don’t do it, I’m quite sure we would have stopped. They were so positive and they said it was great and they thanked us, a few times, thank you for doing this. That was, I think, the greatest reward. It also gave us courage to go out.... They were the only persons who could give or deny that permission.”
It can be both draining and liberating to tour with KAMP, said Kalker. “It has different sides – it has a liberating effect because I feel good about taking the responsibility to tell the world, to show the world how my grandfather was killed. It feels also like I’m taking the responsibility of telling the story for younger generations and that’s a good feeling, like I’m doing something good for [my grandfather] and so that’s very positive. On the other side, I choose not to do it very often, so we perform the show, but not more than 15 or 20 times a year. I couldn’t do it all the time.”
Kalker added, “We can access a wide range of emotions using these models. It gives the opportunity to look at very horrible events or horrible parts of the human soul and history, but also the possibility to give it distance – the audience can also look at [the actors].... Working with puppets gives distance but it’s also confronting, not in a light way, but in a human way, or at least it’s what we try. Actually, I made the show also for myself, to face what happened in a way that was digestible. It’s still very hard to see the details, like the ovens that were made for the bodies, it’s still horrifying subject and the fact that it has taken place is a very difficult thing to deal with.”
Hotel Modern took KAMP to Germany where they encountered a very different reaction to their blend of visual art and puppetry. “There were some people who had problems with us dealing with the subject with puppets. They thought it was not respectful. It made me angry, thinking that the survivors themselves, probably not every survivor, but all the ones we met, were very positive, so then I thought, German people don’t think it’s respectful? They don’t know what they’re talking about! They’re very concerned – they feel so guilty about how to deal with this history that they get a bit too dramatic about it.”
Kalker hopes to take the performance to Israel one day but, due to the current tour schedule, the visit will have to wait.
Hotel Modern produces several shows with lighter subject matter as well. “We also have very happy shows, which are more comedy and light and there’s fantasy in it and we deliberately combine those shows on our repertoire,” said Kalker. “We have a show, it’s called Shrimp Tales – it’s a show also with miniatures and cameras, like animation film, but all the ‘humans’ are played by shrimps – or by prawns, actually. It’s very funny because we have the shrimps in daily life, but all the people are shrimps. It’s really funny because we have a shrimp funeral and a shrimp wedding and a shrimp going camping ... we also have a shrimp brain operation, so we have a miniature operation room and then we have a drill and we drill the skull.”
KAMP is part of the sixth annual PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. It is presented by the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad and Grunt Gallery from Feb. 3-6 at the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre. The show is currently nearly sold out. To inquire about tickets, call 604-684-2787 or visit ticketstonight.ca. Information about Hotel Modern can be found at hotelmodern.nl.
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