Bitef

a big drum, a smaller tower which can move and turn, and a five-metre tall man made of ladders. Our productions now consist of a series of six scenes. There are always longer compositional lines underpinning these series: changes of lighting, dynamics and architecture in the overarching structure of the piece from beginning to end. »You used to be baroque; now you've gone Elizabethan«, comments a spectator; another says: »this is opera!« By the beginning of the eighties every city in France and West Germany has its small summer festival. There are plenty of street theatre companies, but there are hardly any companies which put on wild spectacles in the open for a large audience. We double our price, and there are still months in which we receive six times as many invitations as we can handle. The youth club period is over. Now we tour all the medium-sized towns in Nordrhein-Westfalen, from Munster to Schwerte, from Münster-Gladbach to Giesen. Demanding days: getting up at eight o'clock in the hotel, and driving on to the next town after an hour's breakfast. Two or three hours on the motorway, then unloading, sorting out where everything goes, setting it up and eating something (did you know that you can eat a pizza in five minutes if you roll it up like a pancake?). Then doing the performance, clearing up afterward, loading, a beer, then off to the hotel to sleep, and up again the next morning at eight o'clock, ready for the next town. We reach a much larger audience than we are used to, we earn more and we come into a circuit which is more businesslike. There are still organisers who Invite us because they like out work, but increasingly we only see them for the settling of accounts. Before, when they were involved in drawing up the plan for the performance, organisers used to sit in the front row so as not to miss anything. Now they often stand in a corner and spend most of their time watching the audience to count the heads and the laughs. Before we used to do a different performance each time. Now routine dominates. We have to do a lot of performances to make both ends meet. In the meantime we are building up the company with the permanent members. We fix up the studio and the office. We discover all the rituals which go with preparing a tour: breaking in each new team of free-lancers, loading and unloading the truck,

setting things up on the spot, giving press conferences. The core of regulars is small - we can't afford more. There is plenty of work for a few people. We no longer have time for street acts and we do not perform much in the winter any more. Everyone concentrates on his or her own work; we lose sight of one another and are in danger of runining dry emotionally. Before we used to break out in stormy arguments under the pressure of the preparations, but we soon forgot squabbles like that in the shared pleasure of the performances. Now if someone is angry, it doesn't clear up. In 1 985 a lot of people who have worked with us on a permanent or freelance basis during the last few years decide to leave the company. The three of us who have been working together since 1 975 carry on alone. We have lost interest in the way we work now: If we play these performances too often, they become superficial; »a revue«, according to the cynics among us; brightly-coloured costumes, music, dance, laughter, and surprise. The time has come to stick out our artistic necks. The pieces are impersonal. Every act has its combination of figures and secondary figures. Every player changes costume four times during the performance, and there is no one with whom the audience can identify. There are two possibilities. One is to cany on but with more regular working hours, to standardise the preparations more, to play longer series, and to do small-scale street acts now and then for a change. That would have turned us into a modern kind of circus. A new programme once every two years, a lot of performances, doing the same thing hundreds of times, hard routine, acts which acquire the same precision as those of the old-fashioned circus clowns. We decide to do something different: more versatile work, still doing large-scale performances, but not so often, and never losing the flexibility of the early period. 1 985-1 990: Landscapes and dreams On 1 March 1 986 we place an advertisement in De Volkskrant for a business manager. It is the first sign that we are turning into a different company: a company which can function like a normal company without deficits. We have a larger grant, a well-equipped studio, and we know exactly what we