Bluebeard framed in nightmarish phototheatre (1992)
It was the the photographer Wink van Kempen – who gave me good advice and support at the beginning of my career and made brilliant photo’s for my catalogue Theatrical Research since 1984 and for many other occasions – who proposed to create a new artform: phototheatre! His motivation was simple: as theatre is only in the moment and evaporates in time and photography on the other hand freezes sublime moments into timeless scenes, why not use the latter to create a kind of stopmotion interpretation of drama.
The first story we chose to use for this purpose was that of Bluebeard. After some research it became clear that historically speaking there was very little to hold onto. So i started off writing my own interpretation in a series of poems in prose. In itself a kind of stopmotion. There was no real plot. There were scenes, suggestions of drama, flashes of metaphysics and pure poetry. The title i gave to it was Bluebeard paints his beard.
Then we started making the photo’s (slides). The first presentation was a tape-slide production we produced commissioned by RoTheater in Rotterdam. After one show – only for the group – it wasn’t shown again. The form was too revolutionary for normal people working in normal theatre. They were shocked and thought it an unforgivable sign of vanity that I had acted Bluebeard myself. How pathetic. However we weren’t allowed to take the tape and slides. RoTheater had paid for it, so it was their property, although they didn’t like it (i.e. grasp it). However years later we wanted to show it in a retrospective. We informed, but it had been thrown away when they moved into their own theatre. Unbelievable disrespect and stupidity. I only tell this anecdote as counterpoint to the silent immortal beauty of photography. Of course we had kept the originals.
In 2002 only the slides were shown in random order, projected on the name Bluebeard in Gothic letters. No text. That was in the Oh no not again exhibition.
But apart from the theatrical presentation, the photographic interpretation of Bluebeard and the poems in prose have inspired me to work on a graphic symbiosis together Willem Westerik. Here are the first pages of this work in progress.
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