With their production *15 419ft*, the Post collective from Hessdalen aims to take us on a journey far beyond the curve of the earth, to a place where the unknown and the unimagined lie. It’s a poetic approach, but the execution falls flat.
It can’t have been easy to find a venue for this performance, as 15 419ft requires long, kilometre-long sightlines – and where on earth do you find those in our urbanised Flanders? This is precisely what the collective wishes to explore: in what ways does our physically enclosed environment limit our thinking? Kunnen we niet meer weids denken omdat we nergens meer weids kunnen kijken?
And so we climb the high stands and gaze towards the horizon, together with two figures dressed in white (mezzo-soprano Els Mondelaers and tuba player Berlinde Deman). A rope stretches towards us from afar; we cannot see where it comes from, but a huge wheel between the stands pulls it in, twisting and turning, as if we were drawing the end of the world towards us – only to discover that there is no end, that the longing for a cosmic ‘there’ is in vain, for ‘there’ is always ‘here’ as well.
That image is powerful, but after that the action becomes fragmented. A first-person narrator speaks, describing how she sees a second woman chasing the horizon. She herself is trying with all her might to escape from her own mind. Wooden plaques are held aloft, displaying a play on words.
There is the soundscape by composer Thomas Smetryns emanating from the speakers, but also his ‘remote composition’, which is performed live by Mondelaers and Deman, culminating in a musical dialogue between Mondelaers on the cymbals and a cart full of loud horns rolling in from the horizon – like a cryptic answer to the question of what lies ‘there’.
It sounds a bit vague, and that’s exactly what it is: text, music and imagery seem to operate independently of one another, and the focus is nowhere to be found; which is ironic, because that focus (and our inability to achieve it) was precisely what it was all about.
