Route

Without is a route through a shopping street in the evening, when the shops are closed. The performance focuses on twelve vacant buildings. Each empty interior presents a different scenario created by a choreographed lighting plan. The audience is preceded by two performers who enter several buildings, using flashlights or, if possible, the buildings’ own lighting system to illuminate the landscape of emptiness. The audience remains outside, looking in through the window. They see the vestiges of what once filled the space, and the (architectural) presence that now exists.

A sound work is played on the city centre’s PA system that describes the features of the place where the audience is at that specific moment.

Context

“In the autumn of 2018 I was invited to take part in a residency in the town where I grew up and to create a piece in public space. A week before the residency began, my 20-year-old cousin died in a tragic accident in Sittard. I find her everywhere I go in this place that I left and where she will remain now forever.

Like many small and medium-size towns in the Netherlands, Sittard’s city centre has many abandoned shops and commercial premises. I notice how people are trying to fill the void by cramming store fronts with huge posters, turning off shop lighting, and hanging canvas dividers in empty spaces to make them seem smaller, less deep, less empty. For Without I take the audience with me into the void, and into everything that fills it now. The empty space becomes a projection screen.”

In collaboration with

Antwan Cornelissen, Hidde Aans-Verkade, Charles Pas, Ron Bernstein (Jan van Eyck), Hannah Loewenthal, Studio Noto, Gemeente Sittard-Geleen, SoAP Maastricht, VIA ZUID

Presented

2018  15 – 17 Dec  Sittard (NL)