With the documentary tendency in much theater today, you would sometimes forget it, but the power of performances can also be to take you into a completely different world. That there you can escape from drab and sometimes boring reality, into a universe where other laws apply. The circus performance Ballroom is a wonderful example of this.
This family production plays in the unusual setting of a converted truck – calling card of a company that has deliberately shaped its own terms. Inside, you end up in a gray space: it looks like a basement with concrete struts where Stijn Grupping, the cleaner on duty, has to pick up lost balls from the ground with a suction hose as if they were garbage. When, out of boredom for this monotonous job, he lets a first little ball bounce around the room, a piece of art will slowly develop from it that increasingly stuns young and old alike. What begins as punishing jugglery with collision balls, turns into poetic surrealism when these balls not only make fun of gravity, but also of so many other fixed logics. A completely different world’ can be taken literally.
Post uit Hessdalen (the creator duo Stijn Grupping and Ine Van Baelen) combines different experiences in circus, film and theater, and that is palpable in the attention to image and dramaturgy in this performance. Kafka meets Magritte. A critique of industrial alienation tilts into a celebration of all the imagination you can appropriate for yourself if you seek uncharted paths. A philosophical reflection on time and success at the same time remains highly tangible: does the ball eventually hit the tray or not? One cannot escape the impression that Grupping and Van Baelen thereby simultaneously comment on the predictability of juggling itself. They break its patterns, as all innovators do.
It makes of Ballroom a circus performance with not only impressive technical jugglingskillsbut also a visual magic that will instantly make you feel like a child again. Because beyond the groundbreaking technique that arouses amazement, this performance also simply makes you dream, until after half an hour you bounce like a ball back into reality.
