Of the 4 weekends of the joint project “Come Closer” of the Middelheim Open Air Sculpture Museum and the De Singel concert centre, the second one is on 6-7 July. We visited two captivating performances.
The first is “Pathways”, an art production by Roger Hiorns (1975), a British artist living in London.
From the beginning of the exhibition “Come Closer” in Middelheim Park, two strange and puzzling objects – a motor-engine of unknown origin and an industrial-looking bathtub – have been placed in one of the meadows. It is only during a 20-minute performance that they come to life. A young dancer (they change) with the beautiful body of “David” Michelangelo enters into a dialogue with the iron beast – sniffing, inspecting, touching the motor and making plastic gymnastic pas around it. Man and machine, humanism and industrialism – against the beautiful green of the park of century-old oaks and elms. Can we only guess who this young man is – the alter ego of the artist Roger? Apparently he is. His nudity is poetic and almost innocent. Is it his task to rein in the mechanical monster? Absolutely. Does the performance signify the triumph of the romantic over the rational? In my opinion, yes.
Middelheim is a park and on a Saturday afternoon not every visitor knew about Come Closer. But the children, their parents and their dogs came closer to contemporary art. The concept of the exhibition worked!
The second is Paul Kindersley, British artist and director, who himself takes part in the performance “Dromer in het Woud” (pictured in front of his troupe of actors).
Paul animates sculptures from the Middelheim Museum’s collection and puts Shakespearean in tone and Monty Python in humour into their mouths. He takes the title from the “Forest Dreamer” Osip Tzadkin (pictured), who has revitalised it.
He first built a kind of Wooden House on the park’s pond. In which his characters recite their monologues, dialogues and scenes. Then he wrote a script and made a video with his actors. Audiences in Middelheim Park watch it live.
The second lively object is the bust of “Madame Stone” by French sculptor Charles Despiaux.
The actors are constantly improvising, so that the performance can be watched more than once. And it is definitely a theatre piece – you feel that you are transported to the theatre London, maybe to the Globe, and listen to the recitation of Shakespeare’s passions. Paul as an artist is interested in gender, identity and pop culture. He puts his reflections on these contemporary themes into the mouths of his characters. The performance is, in my opinion, the most colourful of all Come Closer projects!
