Битеф
Towers: Solo acts, visually combined in an architectural arrangement above and beside one another, like a tower of human activities: everyone is enclosed in his or her own little world. The audience observe the contrast in movement, action and lighting, or follow the succession of different actions by the players. Plural acts: The audience walks freely among a number of groups of players. The players do not act simultaneously, but they take it in turns, bringing the audience together in a ring a different position each time. Processions: We have developed all kinds of forms of processions. Sometimes they are passing dream images which stop every now and then and turn into a grotesque act. Sometimes they are a like a turbulent wave of barely recognisable human forms bringing with them an overwhelming barrage of sound, smoke and action. Sometimes they are like a neatly constructed mobile acts machine, each of them working at a different level: it may be an independent image, or it may provoke reactions from the audience and then react to those reactions. The reactions to our work fluctuate between extremes. Either people love our work and come to see it as often as they can; or they think it stupid and irritatedly explain to us that we don't know the first thing about theatre. We always involve the audience in the atmosphere we create, and we receive many invitations to perform. In 1 978, our fourth season, we work with special projects at festivals in Brussels, Le Havre, Hamburg, Tunisia, Freiburg and Berlin. The comment on a landscape spectacle that we present every evening with a cast of thirty during the big Festival of Fools in Amsterdam in 1 980. is: »the only company in the Netherlands which really does just as it pleases«. This style of work continues to inspire us today. It remains an open question whether we should have stuck to this, polishing and perfecting the various forms. Would that have made us a company with a perfect grasp of one unusual method of working? in view of all the changes of scene and situations in which people can walk around, we can never take on an audience of more than two hundred and fifty. In performances of this kind the overall structure is broken down Into separate items and the construction work is divided among a baroque mass of numerous small objects. We want to start working for a big audience, with stronger and
longer lines in the performances. 1 981 -1 985: The years of hard slogging In 1 981 we find a new studio in North Amsterdam: a smal factory building, 20 metres long, 1 3 metres wide and 8 metres high, with large sliding doors so that even our truck can be parked inside. There is a fenced off parking lot next door, so in good weather we work and eat in the sun. The building has been left to rack and ruin; the previous tenant used it to saw up sheets of plaster of Paris, and the dust is inches thick. After two months of scrubbing, renovating and painting, our new house is finished. Now we have an office, canteen, dressing room, shower, toilet and even a small guest room. The rest of the building is our studio, with storage racks, benches, and separate areas for working with metal, wood and electricity. In the same year we receive our first grant, on a basis which is to last until 1 985: roughly half of what we need. From now on we pay ourselves half wages (a leap forwards of a few hundred per cent). The five of us work full-time. We prepare largescale performances and look for ways of organising our company. We expand the company with a lot of free-lance players during the performance periods. in the preceding period we have toured ail over Europe for six years, we have seen other comapnies come and go. We know what we have to do: earn money (you can't count on subsidy), build up a good organisation, and develop a product that can be recognised as ours in the international cultural world. We want to develop performances which can be staged on any square or field, for an audience of between 600 and 1,000 in a fixed position. We don't realise that there are very few of us to keep a circus of this scale running. We begin cautiously experimenting with an indoor theatre production for an audience in a fixed position. It works. We receive our first unconditionally entusiastic review in the Dutch daily De Volkskrant. In the autumn od 1 982 we play a programme of twenty upgraded street acts in the open in front of a black curtain on a 1 5-metre diameter circle. It is a bit homely. In 1 983 we break free with a production on Terschelling beach which is based more on action and a good use of the space than on the exact