Shadow Puppets
By Martin Harries
Kamp
By Hotel Modern
Great Small Works 9th Annual Toy Theater Festival
St. Ann's Warehouse
(closed)
Pauline Kalker, a founder of the Dutch theater
company Hotel Modern, never uses the word toy when referring to her
company's work "Kamp," a 36-by-33 foot model of Auschwitz populated
by 3,000 three-inch-tall figures.
"The word is not in our vocabulary," said Ms. Kalker . . . "We are
making a live action animation film onstage."
-- Patricia Cohen, "Miniatures Amplify a Story
of Horror," The New York Times, 1 June 2010
Three grim adults crouch over a modified reconstruction
of the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. With a small camera,
one of the three shoots scenes from the daily life of the camp, performed
by simple figures. Sometimes the audience cannot directly see what the
puppeteers are doing, and the minute size of the figures in any case
makes it hard to see what transpires with much clarity. A projector
makes scenes visible on a screen upstage. To most viewers, these scenes
will be familiar, but they remain horrible, and viscerally so when,
for instance, one puppet wielding a truncheon again and again strikes
another puppet. Amplified sound accentuates the disturbing effect of
this beating.
In one sequence, Kamp focuses not on
the victims themselves but on the possessions they have been forced
to surrender. The poignancy of these objects is familiar -- the subject
of a memorable sequence, for instance, in Schindler's List.
Nevertheless, when the victims are themselves "performing objects,"
to use a phrase popularized by John Bell, objects stolen from them take
on a different charge. In Kamp, the camera scans open suitcases:
clothing, a pair of binoculars, a menorah. And toys: stuffed animals.
How miniscule must that elephant be, to be a toy for a three-inch-tall
"child"?
The affective force of these objects conjures
daily lives that ended with the arrival at the death camp. "Auschwitz."
"Toy." Words from vocabularies that do not overlap. Just as there could
be no toys in Auschwitz, so Auschwitz must not become a toy. To distance
Kamp and its miniscule figures from toys -- and thereby to
distance these performances from play -- is understandable. As became
clear in the uproar around Zbigniew Libera's Lego concentration camp
sets of 1996, to make a toy of the Holocaust is to risk accusations
of obscenity. "The word is not in our vocabulary."
And yet words not in vocabularies can be the
words most needed. To call Kamp a performance using toys might
seem to suggest that it trivializes Nazi genocide. However, to shut
down the possibility that the puppets of Kamp might resemble
toys eliminates a crucial framework for understanding the piece. While
not so grave a risk as trivializing Auschwitz, there is also a risk
in refusing to recognize play. Surely these three human performers,
moving methodically and deliberately among the models, resemble nothing
so much as serious children at play. When Herman Helle brings a train
into the station the contrast is especially sharp: he both resembles
an earnest boy with his toy train set and re-enacts one of the paradigmatic
scenes of mechanized inhumanity. To pretend that we do not see the earnest
boy would be to erase the serious play that seems to me what justifies
the performance.
This formulation of course invites a return to
the implicit counter-argument: Auschwitz as a site of industrialized
genocide simply does not allow for play. Certainly the screened scenes
of Kamp erase every example of resistance, every "moment of
reprieve," to use Primo Levi's phrase. Life is not beautiful. The performance
is not an exhaustive survey of the whole dystopian city: there is scarcely
a hint of the camp's strata or of the marginally less deprived circumstances
of those who, like Levi, had skills that kept them alive. Kamp
shows us "Kanada," that section of the camp where a group of more privileged
women sorted seized possessions, but one can have no inkling that Kitty
Hart, a survivor of this group, performed a three-act play while there
(as she later recalled). Kamp instead focuses, entirely justifiably,
on the brutally simple narrative invoked by "Auschwitz": a city designed
to kill people.
The screened scenes, that is, are unremitting
in their focus on the horror of the place. And one of the surprising
effects of the puppets is that the audience experiences this horror
in part vicariously. A new group of prisoners arrives by train: we watch
the performers lift flats from inside the cars, each containing the
figures of many prisoners. The camera then scans the group. They are
disconcertingly well-dressed: the men in suits and ties, the women in
dresses. Their clothing will be the last marker of sexual difference
in the piece. What is most striking in this sequence is the way their
eyes, simply holes gouged into their faces, register their encounter
with the place they could not have imagined. The mobile camera surveys
their still bodies, and the audience sees an accumulation of terror.
(In the Times, Patricia Cohen rightly compares these faces
to "Munch-like howls.") Very often, the liveness of this "live animation
film" belongs not to the stationary puppets themselves, but to the camera
that surveys them. The tableaus of horror culminate in a survey of puppet
corpses: one survivor of the gas chamber struggles to move, and collapses.
Along with the intimations of serious play,
there are also suggestions of horror movies: the audience watches giants
terrorize minute prisoners with a camera. The hollow-eyed prisoners
taking in the enormity of Auschwitz seem also to be seeing the hulking
puppeteers who make them move. Susanne Lammers, in a Dutch review, comments
on "the impassiveness that characterises the three performers' silent
and determined efforts to bring the events to life": "This is alienating
and sinister. In its efficiency it recalls the way in which a concentration
camp was run." Such efficiency is especially clear when the three, with
the care of a crack fire brigade, set up the hundreds of small figures
for the roll call.
The homology between the well-calculated performance
and the horrific efficiency of the place it represents is unmistakable,
and yet surely this similarity does not mean one must condemn the performance
as itself horrific. Why repeat these scenes? Walter Benjamin's discussion
of why a child wants "the same thing again and again, a hundred or even
a thousand times" offers a clue. His answer:
This is not only the way to master frightening
fundamental experiences -- by deadening one's own response, by arbitrarily
conjuring up experiences, or through parody; it also means enjoying
one's victories and triumphs over and over again, with total intensity.
An adult relieves his heart from its terrors and doubles happiness
by turning it into a story. A child creates the entire event anew
and starts again right from the beginning. Here, perhaps, is the deepest
explanation for the two meanings of the German word Spielen
["to play" and "games"]: the element of repetition is what is actually
common to them. Not a "doing as if" but a "doing the same thing over
and over again," the transformation of a shattering experience into
habit - that is the essence of play. ("Toys and Play," in Selected
Writings, vol. 2)
Kamp, in a little under an hour, provides
a theatrical abstract of Auschwitz. The effect of the piece doesn't
lie in novelty of subject matter. On the contrary, it relies on the
spectator's having some knowledge of what transpired there -- in complexly
mediated ways, it repeats something known. There is no dialogue: a soundtrack
provides the scenes' sonic complement. No narration provides captions
for what we are seeing, as if to suggest that this is a fundamental
experience that cannot be mastered in linguistic form.
Kamp literalizes a metaphor: all agency
lost, the victims of tyranny become puppets. The performers refuse even
that ventriloquism that is the puppeteer's gift to the puppet. In refusing
to speak for these figures, Hotel Modern confesses the limits of its
powers to speak for or to mediate the experience of Auschwitz's victims.
The most evident of these forms of damaged mediation is the camera,
which produces stuttering scenes of terror. (A darkness around the edges
of the screened images recalls the effect of a pinhole camera.) The
most important form of mediation may, however, be the presence of the
humans who orchestrate this performance of objects. Without the contrast
between their ungainly presence, their dour playfulness, and the scenes
they have staged, there would be no play.
Benjamin's emphasis on play as a form of psychic
mastery and on the transformation "of a shattering experience into habit"
helps to describe the ambiguous power of Kamp. In relation
to the Holocaust, there can be no question of mastery: this goes almost
without saying. And yet, precisely in its combination of the awkwardly
handmade and the elaborately choreographed, Kamp captures a
need to repeat, to try to know what cannot fully be known. Through its
forms of serious play, it reminds the audience of the necessity of repeatedly
trying to know, and also of the inevitable failures of knowledge and
of mastery alike.