Schwalbe plays for a while

performance
Five players build up eleven decors and then break them back down immediately. In the quiet hours of the night, between 23:59 – 06:00, they put on their work gloves and build a series of sculptures. They bring old sets into the hall to set them up again, rebuild them, and then remove once again. Where the walls are black and the light keeps shining, empires rise and fall, and pubs are erected; these pubs then make way for a forest. If you get tired, you can (briefly) doze off, but when you open your eyes again, the chances are that you’ll be in a different landscape.

design
The sets that were built up every night were borrowed from other theatre groups: the legendary interior of Carver’s Café Lehmitz, bags full of deafening cans from Freetown by Dood Paard. It was possible to build up some sets in an instant: a light box with a few stands, for example, from Jetse Batelaan’s Apera. Others took more than an hour to assemble: the house with the matte windows from Bambie 10. During the installation period, the performers concentrated on the action, while our focus was on the images and objects: the unexpected beauty of a flight case that is rolled up with a great rattling noise, or the intermediate images that arose during the changes when someone happened to put some records against the wall in a beautiful composition. The rhythm of a falling cloth. With the known and the found images, we made a continuous composition of constantly transforming theatrical places: places where stories should be able to nestle, yet those stories did not arrive. Just at the moment when the curtain would normally be raised, the breakdown would begin anew.

Nominated for the Mime Prize 2016