Belgian performance collective Ontroerend Goed returns to Perth Festival 2024 with their palindromic opus Are we not drawn onward to new erA. The show, whose title I’ll truncate to AWNDOTNE henceforth, is an impressive exploration of form and content that tests our perceptive powers and our patience in equal measure.
The opening of AWNDOTNE is almost excruciatingly slow and silent – there is a strict lockout once the show begins because letting anyone enter the venue after the show has begun would be extremely disruptive. I shudder to think how many times since the show’s inception have the first 10-15 minutes of near silence been shattered by a rogue mobile sounding off. Thankfully no such disaster struck during the session I attended, but there were some titters from audience members who couldn’t help but break the silence by trying desperately to glean something humorous in the somewhat baffling action on stage.
The first half is full of strange, incoherent, and often glacial movement that some might find terribly difficult to endure. It’s easy to grasp that the performers (Bastiaan Vandendriessche, Ferre Marnef, Britt Bakker, Leonore Spee, Maria Dafneros, and Michaël Pas) are speaking and moving in reverse, but no matter how hard we try, it’s nearly impossible to understand what some movement sequences might be or mean in forward motion. It’s hard to know which language is being spoken backwards.
Once we get to the midway point of the show and it begins to move in a forward motion, which is actually live footage of the show’s first half projected onto a scrim and played in reverse, all of these puzzling sights and sounds start to make sense. It’s a process of unfolding surprises and delights as we connect the most head-scratching backwards moments to their forward motion equivalents. I found myself pondering how our brains really only perceive reality in ‘forward’; when our senses are presented with something ‘backwards’ we need to decipher the code and translate it in ‘forward’ to be able to understand it.
For some audience members, the first half of the show might prove too frustrating to make the second half worth the effort. However, I think most will find the second half rewarding and satisfying to a large degree, and will marvel at the technical aspects the show plays with. The performers had to learn to move and speak backwards in a way that would appear like normal forward movement and speech. It’s also surprising how so much of the movement actually does make sense both forwards and backwards, creating a kind of harmonious through-line in both halves. This harmonious through-line is mirrored in the music that underscores AWNDOTNE, which is William Basinski’s ‘The Disintegration Loops’ by Spectra Ensemble.
In terms of messaging about human-made ecological destruction, AWNDOTNE’s tone is far less bleak than some of the festival’s other offerings. Director Alexander Devriendt and the company seem to take a more optimistic approach to the idea that there might still be hope of finding ways to clean up the messes we’ve made, but they do make it clear that some of what we’ve done can never be undone. The final moments engender a sense of sadness and mourning as the performers leave the stage the way they came in, but they also create a gentle and peaceful sense of letting go.
AWNDOTNE is a performance artwork of significant value in many ways; the process of its creation, the execution of its moving parts, and the ideas it explores all combine to make it a worthwhile endeavour. Patience is required, but the ends justify the means.
CICELY BINFORD
Are we not drawn onward to new erA ran at Perth Festival from 21 – 25 Feb at the Heath Ledger Theatre. For more information, visit here.
