singing eye > het Dierenparadijs

Het Dierenparadijs 2006

An animal kingdom for audiences from 7 - 107 years old
a production of Ned. Vocaal Laboratorium
Duration 60'
Artistic direction Romain Bischoff
Stage direction Bärbel Kühn
Music Nicoleta Chatzopoulou, Pedro Santos,
Wouter Snoei, W. A. Mozart, Rossini, a.o.
Live electronics Tom Tlalim
Live video / puppet theater Mendel Hardeman

When I was asked to join in this project I immediately got excited about it. I had never done anything for children before, but the idea seemed very refreshing. When you do something for an audience that is between 7 and 12 years old, you stop asking yourself all the Big Questions about Art and the Meaning of Things etcetera. You just try to become a kid yourself and do something that sparkles with imagination and the amazement about this mysterious world we live in. Very liberating indeed . . .
The program was built up from many different kinds of music that had one theme in common - Animals. My job was to try and capture the many different parts and styles into one single video idea, and truly be a kid while doing this.

So I invented the Upside-Down Puppet Theater. The idea is very simple: you build a white box, put water in it, shine blue light on it, and hang upside-down backdrops over it. Then you film all this with an upside-down camera, and project it big. What you see is a world where the sky is made of water. You can then make cotton wool clouds to float around in the waving watersky, and at night, when everything is dark, bring in floating candles that look like wavering stars. And play around with the entire Animal Kingdom, with puppets that should be used upside down.
It proved to be quite complicated to learn and control the puppets, because the image you are looking at while you move them is the wrong way around. But the possibilities are endless, and far from being exhausted.
A great advantages of working this way is that you can use virtually anything as a backdrop - my trees were made out of simple paper cuts, which didn't need any reinforcement because they were not standing up, but hanging down instead. One of the many things that were made possible through this procedure was the invention of the Magical Rope-Ladder - one that you can simply throw up into the sky wherever you are, and it stands by itself so you can climb on it. And when you're high up there, a boat comes flying through the sky and takes you along, floating over the foamy cloud-waves.
As said, the only boundaries lay in our imagination . . .

performance history
05.04.06, De Harmonie, Leeuwarden
17.04.06, De Regentes, Den Haag
22.04.06, Schouwburg Odeon, Zwolle
23.04.06, Musis Sacrum, Arnhem
19.10.06, Theater a/h Vrijthof, Maastricht