Review by Joost Goutziers.
Uncomfortable, fascinating and addictive. With Yellow Horizon, choreographer Annemijn Rijk and scenographer Theun Mosk present an immersive, mind-boggling experience at the intersection of visual art and performance, which makes you forget everything that happens outside of it. Watching a circle that changes colour, you live more and more in the present moment, while the senses take over from reason. This is a magical experience, in which complete surrender is essential.
Annemijn Rijk is a choreographer and philosopher. With her platform Body of Art she is looking for in-between space, as she calls it herself. That is the space for change. She does this by bringing together image, dance, theatre, mime and philosophy in a total experience.
Iconic image
Earlier this year she launched the installation Woman’s Work. The viewer enters a dark space with six vertical screens. Each screen shows moving images of a dancer on a balance beam, one and a half metres high. The performers vary in age and background.
For Annemijn Rijk, this installation is an invitation for the audience to think about the ideal of beauty. The images are inspired by catwalks and an iconic photo from 1932 with Irish construction workers sitting high in the air, having lunch on a horizontal, steel beam. It is an installation to look at for a long time. I left at the time because other people wanted to go in too, but I would have liked to stay longer.
Red, yellow, white
Yellow Horizon is also an installation that is difficult to say goodbye to. That feeling is not there immediately, but it is afterwards. The image of the circle slowly moving forwards and backwards with red, yellow, white, and also blue light for a while, remains etched on the retina for a long time, even at night, even the next morning.
The performance begins in the light. Three performers, dancer Noemi Calzavara, actress Sofie Porro and mime artist Niels van Heijningen, walk onto the well-filled stands. They stand close to the spectators and make minimal movements. Noemi Calzavara stands a meter away. She smiles continuously and looks into the eyes of the spectators. Her breathing slowly becomes louder, as do the other two. In this way, they take the audience along in an experience in which the performers themselves have no part for a long time.
Moving disk
A wall with a round circle can be seen on the floor. That circle looks gray with a slightly darker edge. When the light in the hall dims, the light in the disc becomes brighter. Yellow is very present, but red is the most dominant, there are also intermediate shades. Occasionally white dominates.
The disc moves slowly towards the back wall, further away from the stands, and then returns. That pattern repeats itself. At times it is pitch dark, the disc is barely visible or not visible at all. There is nothing to see.
It is a fascinating image to look at. Especially when the disc is further away, it seems as if the colours are running through each other, that patterns can be seen. Or is it the shadow of a dancer?
The eyes do not see everything clearly and the mind colours the experience. That also happens when the disc is turning. Or is that also a delusion? It is a long experience that increasingly takes hold of you and that you hope will never end. The music composed by Aura Bouw supports that intense experience. It seems as if her music originated in the deepest recesses and wants to drag you there. Music, image, light, it feels like a guided meditation.
Smiles
The end of Yellow Horizon is wonderful and different. The three performers are back on the floor. The cheerful, middle-of-the-road song Seabird sounds and the performers move as if they are at a party. With broad gestures, arms spread. Noemi Calzavara continues where she started at the beginning of this production, infectiously smiling.
That scene is a light and clear end, after a dark, disorienting experience. But it is not the song Seabird that lingers like an earworm, it is the image of the circle of light that is stored in the brain. Also the uncomfortable feeling that you are staring intensely and then still do not know whether what you see is reality. Because that red, is that the setting sun?
Asks a lot of the audience
Afterwards, the audience is allowed to write down what the experience was like. It is a production that reportedly elicits widely varying reactions. That is understandable. Watching a moving disc that keeps changing colour for an hour demands a lot from the audience. In any case, complete surrender.
For Yellow Horizon, Annemijn Rijk works closely with Theun Mosk, a renowned scenographer. He previously joined forces with Tourik Delphine, Boukje Schweigman and Robert Wilson, to name but a few names from the theatre world. Annemijn Rijk studied phenomenology, the philosophy of perception. She obtained a master’s degree in it. For Yellow Horizon, she looked for a way to temporarily disorient the senses that provide us with a grip on the world. This is how the idea arose to design a space with light and changing perspective in which the viewer drifts away from control.
