3. Travelling Performances. Wunderbaum’s Looking for Paul
Wunderbaum was formed by six students of the Toneelacademie Maasricht upon their graduation in 2001. That year, they founded Jonghollandiam, which was affiliated with Zuidelijk Toneel Hollandia (in Eindhoven, the Netherlands), then led by artistic director Johan Simons. Between 2000 and 2008, Wunderbaum worked at NT Gent, the city theatre of Ghent, as well as at the Schouwburg Rotterdam. To this day they are very active in the Netherlands and Flanders. They are now an independent company and, since 2013, have been more closely connected to the Schouwburg Rotterdam. In spring 2013, they began their four-year project The New Forest, in which they attempted to develop a new form and concept of living together through different live and mediatized formats. In the meantime, the theatre collective has performed throughout Europe and Northern America. For instance, at Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin, steirischer herbst in Graz, Holland Festival in Amsterdam, theatre-festival Boulevard in Den Bosch, Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Romaeuropa Festival in Rome, Théâtre Paris-Vilette in Paris, the Distinctively Dutch Festival in Pittsburgh, National Review of Live Arts festival in New York City, and Harbourfront Centre in Toronto. At present, the group consists of Marleen Scholten, Wine Dierickx, Matijs Jansen, Walter Bart and Maartje Remmers. Currently they are touring with two new works: Superleuk, maar voortann zonder mij (A supposedly fun thing, I’ll never do again), which is a site specific work dealing with the pursuit of recreation, which can never be fulfilled. The basis of this performance are journalistic texts from the U.S.-American writer David Foster Wallace on his experiences during a seven-day cruise in the Caribbean. Wunderbaum iterated this journey and went on a seven-day-cruise as well: they worked as entertainers on the “Aida Prima”, which sets sail every week from Rotterdam. They wrote texts about their experience there and combined them with Wallace’s essays. The second work, which premiered in 2017, is entitled Wie is de echte Italiaan? (Who is the Real Italian?) and is performed together with live music by Remco de Jong and Florentijn Boddendijk. In this work, they retell a meeting of the Association of Home Owners in Milano, where they expected to get to know the real national character of Italy.
Many of the group’s works have strong local roots, e.g. Eindhoven de gekste (2002), stad 1 and stad 2 (2003/04), Natives (2011), Detroit Dealers (2012), and Superleuk, maar voortann zonder mij (2017). As is the case with Looking for Paul, the performance topics derive their inspiration from the concrete urban context. Rail Gourmet (2010) is a performance that deals with railway-services and takes place in a building next to Rotterdam’s Central Station, whose tracks can be seen through the windows. By choosing urban spaces as theatre sites, a more intensive relation is generated between the audience and the theatrical events. One’s everyday surroundings become the space where art takes place. Even if a performance does not take place on location, Wunderbaum still takes the audience to specific environments: Looking for Paul starts with a video in which Marleen Scholten poses as Inez van Dam and introduces her favorite places in Rotterdam and the controversy surrounding Paul McCarthy’s Santa Claus sculpture.1
Wunderbaum’s performances seem to be set in a kind of soap opera: time and time again the same performers meet, and they always play themselves. The scenes and topics change but the series consistently adheres to the particular aesthetic principles found in Wunderbaum’s work. Scenes, live and on film, are shown in a seemingly arbitrary manner, and it is precisely these variations that demonstrate Wunderbaum’s relational dramaturgy. Yet this does not trigger the impression of authenticity but, as in the works of author and director René Pollesch, establishes a “frayed” or hybrid aesthetics, live and mediatized, authentic and enacted.2
Different aesthetics and theatre signs are juxtaposed non-hierarchically. This leveling is a product of the collective working procedure from which topics, scenes, and performances evolve. Until January 2013, the dramaturgy and direction alternated depending on who was (not) on stage at that moment (Wunderbaum Acteursgroep Rotterdam Gent 2001-2006). Wunderbaum works in two groups of five persons: five act and five run the administration, though as in the case of audience assistant Eva van den Hove, members remain involved in the artistic process by getting updates on the performance process on a one to one basis. From January 2013 to December 2016, dramaturge Tobias Kokkelmans was responsible for the development and organization of (press-)texts, research and broader structures of content. Since 2017 Margreet Bergmeijer is responsible for these duties. Wunderbaum works together with different dramaturges for different projects. Wunderbaum appears—as is common in Flanders and the Netherlands—as a collective. This is also true for the authorship of Looking for Paul. The five performers first developed the plot, then shaped the script through an intensive e-mail exchange, which resulted in printouts that do not differentiate stage directions from the main text. Thus the script starts with “13 mei 2010, Aan Matijs, Walter en [email protected] / He jongens / We gaan naar Los Angeles! Gisteren kreeg ik een email van Mark Murphy van het Redcat Theatre. We hebben het geld! Alles! 20000 dollar! Wauw, ik heb er zo’n zin in! Kus Marleen.”3 (“13 May 2010, to Matijs, Walter and Maarten / Hey guys / We’re going to Los Angeles! Yesterday I received an e-mail from Mark Murphy at Redcat Theatre. We go the financing! All of it! 20,000 Dollars Wow, I am really looking forward to it! Kisses, Marleen.”) The academic search for information on the writing process, which also took place via e-mail, mirrors the evolution of the text: “Beste Katharina / We hebben inderdaad de e-mails naar elkaar geschreven. Maar van tevoren hadden we wel alles al uitgedacht dus het was vrij duidelijk waar we naartoe zouden schrijven. Als je wilt kunnen we er eens over bellen. / Groet van Matijs.” (“Dear Katharina / We did indeed write each other e-mails. But before we did so, we thought about it well, so we were indeed clear about whom we had to write to. If you would like, we can talk about it on the phone. Greetings, Matijs.”)
The performance is structured in three parts. First, guest-actor Daniel Frankl introduces Wunderbaum and briefly describes their collaboration during the L.A.-guest-residency. The opening words lead to the presentation of Inez van Dam (Marleen Scholten), who enters the stage from the audience to start her slide show on Rotterdam. In the second and longest part (which is the only scripted part in the Netherlands version, while for their performance in L.A., which didn’t mix Dutch and English but only used the English language, they scripted the whole work), first four, then eventually five performers sit on white plastic chairs behind five microphones on the empty black box stage, beside a video-wall in the right corner. They read the e-mail conversation out loud, which describes the production process, interspersed by a short video sequence showing Wunderbaum in Los Angeles. During the reading, the performers address the audience with their gestures and their gaze. By doing so, the audience becomes familiar and involved with their perspective, which often turns out to be in conflict with opinions of the other group members. The time pressure, created by the incipient premiere, adds to the tension. All of this tension is discharged in the third and final part, the reenactment of Paul McCarthy’s performances. Accessories such as masks, bales of straw and said fluids, gestures and movements reference McCarthy’s works in a playful manner.
What kinds of travel build the basis of the performance? How is travelling staged, and how does this lead to the hybrid aesthetics the audience experiences? “Travelling” is the very beginning of the performance and it anchors its development. The opening words of Daniel Frankl make this clear: only because Wunderbaum was selected as L.A.-artists-in-residence does a performance called