Peeping Tom is a fantastic Belgian dance, mixed with plenty – of – physical – theatre, a company slightly different from the most generalization of contemporary dance. Part of the trilogy theatre-play, the latest one “Child“ provokes unease sensation because of the dystopian view of a dysfunctional, psychotic family, living in isolation. It is something between dance and physical theatre, more – less a physical theatre play. Peeping Tom’s „Child“ is an astonishing piece of work, with surreal, unsettling imagery as the corresponding choreography that suits really well in the frame of the story. “Child (Kind)” actually explores perceptions of the childhood of a deeply disturbed and isolated child with her psychotic parents. Imagine eerie woods of towering trees and menacing cliffs that open up grotesque and disturbing scenes that provoke fear and dreams of a girl caught up in a very toxic, murderous, and traumatic situation. A that presented in opera style – because a child in a play is an opera singer, mezzo-soprano Eurudike De Beul. Plus, conveying her body language, while, as it seemed, swirling around the borders of reality, “Child (Kind)” features a mezzo-soprano and surprisingly (as usual for opera singers overweight) elastic dancer with other, very dancy, elastic, and amazing dancers to come along, in the creation of dreamy D.Lynch’s alike scenery. The Olivier Award-winning Belgian company Peeping Tom follows productions of Mother and Father, while this was the final part of a family-themed trilogy. The authors of the production are Gabriela Carrizo and Franck Chartier, who are fascinated with the human psyche and the construction of identity. Franch at the press conference explained the belief that every faulty gene of one disturbed, psychotic family is rooted in genes, in fact, he explored a violent code inherited from the 7th generation, back in history in one person’s family tree and that this twisted and disturbing gene of one person’s tendency to violence cannot be avoided easily, because it sits there and waits for 7th generation to re-appear again.
The third part of Peeping Tom’s family trilogy (after “Vader” (2014), “Moeder” (2016), “Kind” – “Child” 2019) explores the themes of memory, recollections, and the tragic links in the genetic material of one person. Gabriela Carrizo and Franck Chartier here explore the sources of psychosis from the point of view of the child. During the development of a piece, the company organized a series of workshops with children of different age groups. This is how the directors and the performers gained a better understanding of the plastic and artistic potential of children, studying their gestures and body language, in order to gain more insight into how children deal with certain fears, in the case of the absence of support in the family, how do they manage absence, loss, conflicts? A “Child” is a deliriously inventive psychodrama, accompanied by suspenseful, surreal, and dreamy physical theatre. The elements of innocence, voraciousness, violence, and destruction, as principal ingredients in the performance that follows, with a forest creature, shaped like a deer’s head and stilettoes with human legs. As if from another dimension, the landscape of the untamed images may be about someones’ traumatic childhood. We have Liu’s virtuoso, shown in slow-motion convulsions. De Beul bashes someone’s head with a rock, while the child caressed the deer, also a real child who appears in this world of dreams, impulses, and terrors vision.
Gabriela Carrizo Argentinian dancer and French Franck Chartier established the dance company Peeping Tom. They create “Caravana”, “Une vie Inutile”, the acclaimed trilogy “Le Jardin” (2002), “Le Salon” (2004), and “Le Sous Sol” (2007), followed by “32 rue Vandenbranden“ (2009) and “A Louer“ (2011) etc… I saw Peeping Tom company at least 3 times at www.belgradedancefestival.com by now and every time they were exceptional. I recognize similar theatre elements in the performance of Dutch-Belgian Needcompany, which is no wonder because Chartier and Carrizo both worked with Needcompany. With their wide-ranging interests, together with the distinctiveness of the company’s elastic dancers, Peeping Tom created original cross-disciplinary choreographic language. Given their background in dance, and movement, their theatre elements involve the audience in the intimate experience on stage. „Carrizo and Chartier define this intimacy as the rendering visible off and zooming in upon that which is invisible, which at first sight appears insignificant, and which is essential but denied or glossed over. The human condition is at the core of Peeping Tom’s artistic project.“
That is of course- if you like physical theatre productions that strongly involve the staging of parallel worlds, discontinuous universes, the logic of time, space, and an uneasy, dark atmosphere.
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