Springville

By employing an absurd logic and by playing with proportions, these characters move us with the results of their disfunctionality in their poetic game of chaos, expectation and surprise.

Along the way they lose their trusted nature and the environment changes into the scene of a still landscape that’s running wild and unfolds into infinity.

Springville is a performance dominated by the visual. Set design, costumes, props and characters are closely interwoven and merge into one another.

MIET WARLOP ON SPRINGVILLE

‘Shaking up the static to such an extent that life or movement emerges from it is something that frequently recurs in my work. Trying to ‘reanimate’ lifeless objects with a breath, or trying to educate a chair. Obstinately searching for a new direction or purpose for objects that have become so familiar that all their possibilities seem to have been exhausted. Brutally mixing up their underlying, predetermined relationships in the same way that a natural disaster can. You can see this in photos of areas that have been visited by a violent hurricane. Destruction breathes new life into all objects. A new logic reigns over the environment. The relationships between objects are changed. Chairs that were standing in the garden are now standing on the roof: a tree emerges from a window instead of from the ground; or a car stands vertically against a wall. Images like this have a simple yet unearthly beauty.’

‘Springville also has affinities with slapstick, like that of Buster Keaton. Especially playing around with proportions, the clumsiness, the impractical, and the improbable stunts appeal to my imagination. I love passing references, the physical, and reflex reactions. And above all the fun to be found in failure.’

‘From the moment something has found a place in Springville, it is turned upside down or broken. The story not only develops while you watch it; even reality itself is constantly being transformed.’