Bitef

Beneath us the world and darkness, above We are full of love Fragments from essay by Erwin Jans 1. Watch out, the world is not behind you. Graffiti. Sprayed on a wall somewhere in the world. As a warning. It's a line from The Velvet Underground song Sunday Morning (1966). In the opening scene of The Deer House there is a brief discussion between Hans Fetter, Maarten and Misha. Isn't the line actually Watch out, the world is behind you? So where exactly is the world? This question is not irrelevant to anyone who creates plays and wants to use the resources offered by appearance to say something about being. Where is the world, for a theatre company which, as Benoît summarises at the start of the show, has been on tour for 146 days in a single year and has done 103 performances in 16 countries? Where does being end and appearance begin, and vice versa? Who or what defines the boundary? Who or what guards the checkpoint? How much world is there in the theatre? For anyone who spends more than half their time in the theatre, it becomes part of the world. The company's life together, performing together and travelling together slowly work their way into the show. Yet the question remains: how much world can the theatre take on? In Rio de Janeiro, a dead child lay in front of the entrance to the theatre, Benoît filmed the child, he tells us, but a woman stopped him and asked him for money to carry on filming. In the meantime, Benoît and his fellow actors are on stage slowly changing into gnome or elf costumes. If theatre is a fairytale, where is the world? Take the example of a war photographer. He photographs the world. He knows exactly where the world is: in front of his lens. The world in front of the lens is all that counts.'lf you give power to your imagination, you will not survive a war.'The war photographer does not lose himself in a dream world. He unrelentingly records what he sees, what happens - however horrible it may be. 'But at the same time he does not want to accept reality. He hopes his photos will have some effect. He hopes they will set something in motion. Make reality more bearable. This is what a photographer does.'A theatre-maker is no war photographer. The world does not appear in front of his lens. No, the theatre-maker is a gnome. But he doesn't want to accept reality either. He hopes his fairytales will set something in motion. Make something more bearable. Whatever that something may be,'Deer know they will die. So I have to massage their hearts,'says Grace. Perhaps that is what the gnome wants. Perhaps telling a fairytale is something like massaging the heart. To remove the fear and postpone death a little. 2. 'I take no part in this war. Yet it is still my war,' says the war photographer in a diary he has left behind. It seems that since the early nineteen-nineties - the war in Yugoslavia, the first Gulf War - war has been making a 'comeback'. It's not about the return of the reality of military operations (they have never gone away), but about the return of war as a figure in our symbolic world. A crucial part of this new set-up is the special relationship between war and the media (and médiatisation).