JOLIEN NAEYAERT

Performance / Scenography

Kask, School of Arts, Ghent 2013

 

 

Only two hundred metres away from the house she grew up, a feral and obsolete meadow intrigued Jolien. Long grass, tree arcades, hurling wind, large view. A unique place, lost in translation. Could Jolien’s gaze and perception of the overlooked place, be activated and shared with others? Resolute to find out, she decided to build a site-specific construction. A kind of ‘viewing box’ - scale 1/1 - consisting of four partitions; four wooden frames with black curtain walls and vertical wooden rooftop shelves, creating a scenography from which people could stare and focus more closely on the surrounding landscape.

 

The performance ‘They are three/They are many/Or are they outnumbered?’ shows a singular play, performed by a group of red heads wandering through the landscape. Mysterious creatures, making the place even more uncanny. By opening and closing the black curtains, the landscape became a ‘tableau vivant’, firing ones imagination.

 

Guiding the audience through different kinds of perspectives, Jolien also constructed a path from which the meadow could be entered. With the help of the local farmers, she was able to create a trail that connected the starting point and the meadow in one straight line, crossing four cornfields. The audience had to pass three ‘doorways’, installed on the trail, before they could set foot on the intriguing world of obsoleteness.