Performance
Before the Black Box begins one hour before the start, at the entrance of a closed theatre. We arrive early. During the day, the square fills with groups of tourists gathering around their guide — not to be introduced to the place itself, but because it’s one of the few quiet spots in Amsterdam’s city centre where you can tell a story, refill your water bottle, and take a seat. Before connects the historical layers of the square, (once a marshy landscape) and the adjacent former monastery to the site’s current purpose. At the same time, it brings a new story to the square: a myth set in an enclosed, dark space, from a time before the performing arts and the seasons, about the return of the light.
Eventually, visitors are led into the theatre through the back entrance to witness the final minutes before the performance begins, before the official doors open and the general 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)