Performance
Before the Black Box begins an hour before the start, in front of the closed theater entrance. We are early. Earlier in the day, groups of tourists gather on this very square around their guide—not to learn something about the location itself, but because it is one of the few quiet spots in Amsterdam’s city center where you can tell a story, fill your water bottle, and sit down for a moment. Before connects the historical context of the square, once a marshland, and the neighboring former monastery to its current use. At the same time, it introduces a new story to the square: a legend set in an enclosed dark space, before the existence of the performing arts and the seasons, about the return of the light.
Eventually, the visitors are led into the theater through the back entrance to witness the final minutes before the performance begins, just before the doors officially open and the regular audience joins them.
Before the Black Box was developed for the Beyond the Black Box festival.
Press
The intervention produces an inverted spectacle, of being tolerated as a spectator in a room being prepared for something, with whispering staff and technical concerns, with again mere details, which, however, indirectly say a lot about what is to come and how things happen in a black box.
This final, extremely poetic move does more than asking spectators to look at details and realise that every location has a history, a context and conventions. Hoofwijk brings up the attention and circumspection of theatre-making itself – on location, in situ – as a highly relevant way of dealing with the surface, with the appearance of things and their surroundings, the current context or the underground. In that respect, she almost makes the distinction between theatre and other locations disappear, although she also very nicely indicates the distinction. In the story in the square at the beginning, Hoofwijk connected the myth of light to the magic of theatre, as light radiated from her hands.
Fransien van der Putt in Theaterkant | 5 febr 2024
Read the full review here.In collaboration
SoAP Maastricht, Vlaams Cultuurhuis de Brakke Grond, Beyond the Black Box, Ani Rose Deal, Juan Belmar, David Weber-Krebs
Presented
2024 01 – 04 Feb Beyond the Black Box, Amsterdam (NL)
2025 30 – 02 Feb Beyond the Black Box, Amsterdam (NL)