01 Reflection
Starring …
Written by Pum van de Koppel
ACT 1
I depart from my home to attend an event at the Artistic Research Studio, and arrive in IJburg a bit earlier to help with setting up the space. There I meet Nelli Molfenter (later as "Big Movie Star") and Ian Marquez Garcia (later as "Organ Player"). They introduce each other. The "Big Movie Star" remarks that she is German upon which the "Organ Player" said that you couldn't hear an accent at all. I speak to them a bit more in my Dutch accent and then leave them to their rehearsal. I go backstage to help with making dinner for the attendees. My script for the evening is asking "Would you like some soup?". After the guests trickle in, socialise with the celebrity cats ('Blue' and 'White') and have some of this soup, we all shuffle chairs to the downstairs around the improvised podium. The ambient lights turn off and the spotlight turns on.
ACT 2
In the negative of the bright light we all sit around, in an embrace with the stage.
The performance has an elaborate script with multiple scenes and characters: a famous actress "Big Movie Star" slowly loses herself when the movie industry transitions from the 'silent movies' to the 'talking pictures'. The "Big Movie Producer" and the "Agent" push her around, tell her to sing, to put on her 'Big Smile'. She refuses to use her voice because its absence warranted the only agency she had left on the screen. Throughout the scenes the leading character looks to interpret the world herself, instead of being interpreted. In one scene she is spinning around and around, blurring the world she inhabits. In another, where she is lying on a hospital bed after a psychotic episode, she notices a stranger standing perfectly symmetrical in the frame of the open door.
Intermezzo - a few days
A French guy (Derrida) philosophised that to completely welcome a guest, must also mean the possibility that the host has to nullify themselves, 'Absolute Hospitality'. I hung around on the internet and clicked on a YouTube video about it (by 'Philosophy for Where We Find Ourselves'). The American guy in the video quotes him: "Language itself is already hospitality".
I overhear someone from the audience wishing to have read the script along, maybe feeling like they missed out on something, an understanding.
The performance ended.
I forgot exactly how, but remember a metaphor with a moth. In the script as well as on stage it appeared, spinning and circling in between the light and the darkness.
I do come here more often, seated in corners and shadows.
Here we remain more characters than actors.
What if hospitality must also mean the possibility for the guests to occlude themselves?
The cats (from Act 1) don't speak English. Neither do they have an accent.
An exhibition with curtains.
Just like the evening oscillated from the strong diction of the "Big Movie Star" to the moody soundtrack by the "Organ Player" and back, I navigate between different modes of relating towards the theatrical space and towards the others. Overhearing the breathing of a neighbour in the audience, or retreating in my own thoughts. Noticing the glimmering spotlight reflected in the eyes of the performer. A guest appearance of a moth, a phone in my pocket. Here in the east of Amsterdam Oost, the mythical New York City of the "Big Movie Star" feels very close by.
Sitting here with too much soup, I am left to digest words. An abundance of words (of New York slang) and a lack of. An acknowledging of strangers, strangeness. Emancipation without words.
Pum van de Koppel is infiltrating, constructing, mixing, painting, making websites, glueing, politicizing, cycling, attempting, looking out of the window, structuring, cuddling, spilling, lecturing, untangling and writing about art from a personal perspective. He works as a visual artist and graduated from the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague in 2023. He is archiving verbs on his website
http://pumvandekoppel.nl and self-promoting on instagram @pumvandekoppel.