Among the multitude is a proposition to review and rethink our position as collective viewers of ourselves and of the world around us. It is a journey from the deepest of our European landscape to the shared and enclosed space of theatre.

a david weber-krebs film
with tjebbe roelofs
production joggem simons/inexselsisvideo
camera joost rietdijk, david weber-krebs
assistance arnaud arseni
sound tim egmond, coordt linke
thanks to arnoud noordegraaf, and the families cassart, max, grosjean, thonon, gillet, de volder, lemaire.

a david weber-krebs performance
in collaboration with seppe baeyens, hans bryssinck, ugo dehaes, suze milius, natascha pire and mike van alfen.
artistic assistance anne rooschüz
with people from leuven
costume supervision elke lahousse

this version of among the multitude is a stuk production. the project was originally created in amsterdam as a frascati, inexselsisvideo and infinite endings production. with the support of nfpk+, afk and clap! liège.

Recollection is a storytelling machine playing with the expectations and projections of the unique spectator. Recollection tells stories. Stories about great voyages around the world. Stories about strange sorts of fruits found in the freshly colonized lands at the other side of the planet. Stories about anonymous sailors. Stories about birds, fish, four footed beasts, insects and reptiles.

Balthazar is the first result of a long-term artistic research project by David Weber-Krebs (Director) and Maximilian Haas (Dramaturge), which looks at animals and their behaviour on stage. The first outcome of Balthazar was rehearsed and staged at the mime department of the Amsterdam School for the Arts as part of a project with students in March 2011.

the performance
Balthazar is a piece for one animal performer and six human performers. The protagonist is a donkey named Balthazar who is central to every action that takes place on stage. The project was inspired by Robert Bresson’s film Au hazard Balthazar (1966), which tells the eventful life story of a donkey: from his early adoption by a human family, through several changes of owners and tasks, until his lonely death; the animal spirals down towards its tragic destiny. The film enacts the dramaturgy of ancient tragedies (especially as understood by Walter Benjamin) and of the Christian passion. These two leading Western narratives concern the isolation of a single outstanding and exemplary person – who represents mankind as a whole – and the fulfilment of his destiny. Bresson takes as his central figure who suffers a distressful fate an animal – that most indulgent of beasts, a donkey. By so doing, he brings animality into the very heart of Western tales that track the course of man into his own being (…) more

marie urban

What is going to happen when we are all together in the dark?

“a unique theater experience that one is not likely to forget.”
Mannheimer Morgen.

Tonight, lights out! transposes this action from the level of an entire country to the closed space of a theatre. It is about the creation of a belief. The belief that by accomplishing a simple task together, you can truly change something.

click here for the critic in Mannheimer Morgen

a stichting INFINITE ENDINGS production in co-prodution with STUK, Zeitraumexit and Theater Zeebelt. thanks to Frascati.
tonight, lights out! is made possible with the support of NFPK and AFK

In Into the big world we listen to a elaborate performative poem spoken by two young women. The text is distillated from the catalogue library of Teylers Museum in Haarlem. This institution was founded in 1784 in a time where the world was seen as a whole that needed to be known through all its aspects and conquered; a time away from the obscure dogmas of religion and autocracy towards the lights of knowledge, positive sciencesand democracy.The time of the Enlightenment.
Into the big world takes the numerous titles of the books enclosed in the catalogue as literary material for the establishing of a theatre text. The titles become sentences. Anne Breure en Niki Hadikoesoemo are on stage saying the text as their text, actualizing all those sentences, incarnating the gap between the world of the past and the here and now of the theatre.

Into the big world neemt de reeks boektitels die de catalogus bevat als literair materiaal voor het vaststellen van een theatertekst. De titels worden zinnen. Anne Breure en Niki Hadikoesoemo zijn op de vloer, zeggen de tekst alsof ze van hen zijn, maken de zinnen actueel, belichamen het gat tussen de wereld van toen en het hier en nu van het theater.

Click here to view the embedded video.

BALTHAZAR. Sharing the world with the voiceless is a performance for one animal and for human performers. A donkey – Balthazar – is the protagonist and the centre of the action on stage. The animal is present during the whole performance while the nameless performers enter and disappear. The play consists of a loose sequence of actions, of scenes and of fragments that do not make a coherent story but rather lead – by way of aesthetic formalization – towards a situation. The play finds inspiration in Robert Bressons film Au hazard Balthazar (1966), which counts the biography of a donkey. It repeats the artistic act, which Bresson performs in a film with respect to the animal, and puts it into the context of the performance.

BALTHAZAR. Sharing the world with the voiceless confronts scenes where the animal alone holds the stage with others where active performers overscan the situation with actions and fragments of narration. Cultural projections on the animal are presented and actually revived in the spectator who, as he recognizes and is able to analyze them, falls under their power. The performance refers to notions of animal that are well known in many spheres of culture such as literature (Tolstoj, Kafka, animal tales), movies  (Bresson and others), the naturalistic theatre and the experimental lectures of the 19^th century.

The animal exists, it creates an actuality which human beings represent. The play oscillates between performance and theatre, if performance means an open-resulted communication between performer and public, and theatre a specific representation of an absent meaning.  The play oscillates between an intimate and direct encounter with the animal and its perception as part of a fictional framing. The purpose is to lead the spectator towards a (self)reflexive contemplation of the donkey; this is possible because the contemplation is ever so often disturbed by the intervention of the (human) performers who project their cultural quotations on the animal, revive them by the same token in the spectator and withdraw them in a way that their absence is felt. In the end, the cultural projections on the animal are strained, stressed, eroded, worn out, abraded.

BALTHAZAR. Sharing the world with the voiceless is a performance by David Weber-Krebs (direction) and Maximilian Haas (dramaturgy). The first working period of this project will be realized in a first production phase (March 2011) with a group of students of the Mime School (Hogeschool voor de Kunsten, Amsterdam).

direction david weber-krebs
dramaturgy maximilian haas
performance johannes bellinkx, sanne de wit, tim senders, dionne verwey, abdelkarim el baz, sus verbruggen
research marie urban
technique jeroen de boer, bart van den heuvel, tim van’t hof
production tim nieburg, petra ponte, yvonne guis
thanks to stefan rosinski, stella van leeuwen, rik van der zouwen and family.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If we talk about spectacle we talk about the spectator. There is no spectacle without spectator. On that note I am reminded of this curious French hyperonimous expression “spectacle vivant”, living spectacle. As if there would be a dead spectacle… Theatre, dance, performance, mime, all forms of events that place bodies in action in front of a group of people all find a place within the category of living spectacle. Films, video screenings or any sort of gathering of people with the main activity of watching are also considered spectacles but not as living spectacles. This simplistic differentiation is too easy to dismiss to even keep on arguing about it but it has the merit of drawing the attention to the act of watching. They are all spectacles because people are watching. If at night with my laptop on my knee I am watching a downloaded movie it is not a spectacle because it is a lonely activity. There is no gathering. But on the other hand, being alone in the situation of watching the movie is something that could in turn be considered a spectacle if there were, for example, a hidden spectator watching me like in Diderot’s imaginative performance of le fils naturel.

If we then draw our attention to the spectacular we are brought onto something else. We would probably talk about an explosive extension of the notion of spectacle. Spectacular is what brings spectacle to its culmination. Things would be- come bright and loud and would involve strong feelings and provoke them all together. Following Plato and Guy Debord we would be separated from the action. Dumb cows following the spectacular travels of the train in the lowlands, eternally separated from its speed piercing the space, forever ignorant of the exotic stations it will stop at. The spectacular has provoked a whole tradition of critique of spectacle and the spectator. This cow should act and not just watch the train passing by! She should either try to stop the train and enter it in order to become an active passenger and see the world! Or she should organize a movement against the train line that is destroying the landscape and expropriating the farmers of their land! In Abbas Kiarostami’s Five we follow the destiny of a piece of wood. It lies first on a beach and is quickly seized by the peaceful waves. It moves between the sea and shore repeatedly. Nothing happens other than that monotonous movement. We are rocked by the everlasting sound of the waves. Suddenly the wood breaks into two pieces. This separation is the beginning of a story that easily opens the doors of anthropomorphic and symbolic comprehension. This piece of wood was one and now they are two and those two will never get back together. They flow apart and ultimately one disappears at the horizon. It is the tragedy of separation brought to a simple, material form. It is also just a piece of wood breaking apart on a beach.

Why is this movie more than a somewhat clumsy nature film? What tension is coming out of those images? Why was a camera there, at that moment, putting her eye on something that would have remained unnoticed without her presence? Is there a truth to those images? And who is holding this camera? Whose hand left the wood there on the beach and how much did this person know of what would happen? Was it just a walker passing by? Or some kind of demiurge forcing the laws of nature to his will? And finally what is the spectator doing in all this?

He is watching. He is fascinated. He is asking those questions.

What a spectacle!