April 13, 2025 Jasper Delva at pzazz.be
The magic of bouncing balls
It may be a sunny spring day outside, but inside the cargo bed of the truck of Post from Hessdalen, the circus troupe around theater producer Ine Van Baelen and cinematographer and circus artist Stijn Grupping, the atmosphere is completely different. Dressed in gray clothes, except for a red cap, Grupping shuffles and trudges along while sucking up white balls with a green vacuum cleaner. He collects them in an equally green bucket. He looks somewhat tired, pipsqueak, jaded.
You could do for less with that monotonous work he keeps doing, one ball after another. No doubt his work environment doesn’t help either. The drab space consists only of shades of gray. Gray plastic boxes, gray carpet, gray-dark chair and table. But it is mainly the concrete columns and ceiling beams designed by visual artist Lodewijk Heylen that define the colorless and joyless atmosphere. The impressive scenography creates a heavy, oppressive feeling. You almost experience the walls coming down on Grupping.
The many walls from the sad, almost claustrophobic concrete work setting suddenly turn out to be a blessing.
The whole thing has something Kafkaesque about it. Are we looking here at a working class Gregor Samsa from Kafka’s classic “The Metamorphosis” who has to go through the same monotonous, exhausting routine every day? The fast, gabby techno that occasionally resounds when Grupping briefly takes his earbuds out suggests such a thing. Those earbuds, moreover, suggest that he especially doesn’t want to realize he’s at work. Yet all the while he keeps on cleaning up balls with his vacuum cleaner.
He sits down tiredly taunted. It seems as if the monotony of his work has stretched itself like a gray web over his thoughts. Until he discovers that the balls are bouncing. The many walls from the sad, almost claustrophobic concrete work setting suddenly turn out to be a blessing. In typical Post from Hessdalen style, this leads to a mostly rhythmic but at the same time surprising visual game in which Grupping repeatedly seeks and finds trajectories through all kinds of surfaces to make the balls land in the gray basket.
The scene is reminiscent of a Rube Goldberg machine video, the collective term for videos in which people, for example, try to make a ping-pong ball end up in a cup via an absurdly complicated course. At the same time, it reminds one of Kafka. A simple goal requires a ridiculously complicated, inscrutable system. The often constructed chain reaction system is so complicated that the goal – the ball lands in the cup – becomes almost trivial. The original goal disappears from view; what remains is the logic of the system itself. Exactly the feeling Kafka evokes.
Suddenly we find ourselves in a completely different world: it no longer breathes Franz Kafka but Réné Margitte.
Yet the bouncing seems to do wonders for our lonely protagonist. Totally warmed up, he takes off his gray sweater and reveals another one, light blue and full of clouds. Or not, because soon he seems to have run out of this new routine as well. In a Kafkaesque world, is man himself a collision ball? Is he forever trapped in variations of this monotonous merry-go-round? Will he then never manage to escape the colorless monotony?
He then drops the balls, but they suddenly don’t bounce. A dreamy soundscape by Frederik Meulyzer and Jochem Baelus fills the now more colorfully lit room. What follows, I can and will reveal, only that we suddenly find ourselves in a completely different world. Which no longer breathes Franz Kafka but Réné Margitte. Surreal, almost dreamlike scenes lead the dance, with the balls in a completely different, unexpected role.
Until Grupping seems to wake up from his dream. Reality catches up with him. He puts on his gray sweater and plugs his ears again. His dream turns out to be a deception. He stares wistfully, blankly ahead. He looks right through us. Until the audience begins to clap enthusiastically.
With “Ballroom,” Hessdalen-based Post builds on previous performances “Pakman” and “Man Strikes Back” in terms of content and artistry. As before, you watch a short, powerful play in space and time that aptly questions how we experience time as modern working people. ‘Ballroom’ is thus more of the same recipe, but at the same time adds the necessary extras. The surprising way in which the impact balls are deployed this time is definitely the most refreshing thing about this latest pitch. At the end, it appears that the surreal magic of the collision balls cannot completely break the monotonous logic of the system at the end. It shows that Grupping and Van Baelen, in contrast to the somewhat naive ending of “Pakman,” deal with their subject matter in a more critical manner.
