PROTOCOL

The performance seeks to be a ritual to conjure and confront these new gods, to give form to the chaos of our reality. The aim is to present the piece at festivals, in clubs, or other forms of collective celebration. 

A true ritual with the audience, pushing towards and perhaps even crossing a boundary together. To achieve this, the performance unfolds as one continuous crescendo lasting one hour, in which all media—dance, music, light, scenography—steadily build from nothing to a climax. The beat is the driving force behind this build-up. Live drumming is combined with electronic beats. The role of drums in ritual forms such as Noh theatre thus flows into the techno beat which, since the 1990s has been a more recent musical-ritual shaping of an ever-accelerating, dystopian world.

How far can the arc of tension be stretched? How large, how intense, how much pressure can be created and sustained?

In PROTOCOL, electronics (Ofer Smilansky), musicians (percussionist Ruben Martinez Orio and all-rounder Eva Reiter) and dancers (Mooni Van Tichel, Elsa Tagawa, Robson Ledesma and Magdelaine Hodebourg), play together with anticipation and escalation, in the middle of the dance floor. They move from minimal sounds, gestures, and silence to an overwhelming, intense climax that keeps growing. 

Through this dynamic of build-up and interaction between dancers and music, an in-between space opens up in which the new gods of our time may appear. This will not, however, be represented literally. The dancers wear costumes that magnify or abstract certain traits, and their interactions and movements are likewise transformed rather than literal.

“It is not always the same gods who govern the heavens. It is not always the same rulers who collect taxes in the cities and in the countryside.”
- Italo Calvino

An inspiration for PROTOCOL is the ritual of the Hauka from the first half of the twentieth century in Ghana and Niger, as documented in Jean Rouch’s film Les Maîtres Fous. In these rituals, members of this community—mainly Ghanaians and Nigeriens for whom the urban context and the colonial structure of society were relatively new—invoked the new gods of technology, the city, and power. They appropriated the dynamics and positions that were overtaking their environment and began to perform them ritually. 

They copied the generals, the commanders, the buildings, the locomotives, the weapons, the round table discussions of the British colonial occupier. The reasons for this remain debated, but the ritual nevertheless raises the question of who today’s new gods are and how we might relate to them. The Mad Politician, AI, Climate Change and the Ego are already strong contenders.

In an era when the status of facts and truth is shaky, the term “gods” has again become an intriguing one. The designers of AI themselves do not fully understand how AI works, and for now it is largely about the marketing of expectations: AI, then, is a matter of belief. The same applies to populist, authoritarian leaders who refuse to be constrained by reality and demand absolute faith: whether Trump, Netanyahu, Putin, or Kim Jong Un. 

Climate change is such a vast and sprawling crisis that its existence is not a matter of belief, but our relationship to it is; abstract, requiring conviction. Individualism, social media and neoliberalism have turned the Ego into something divine: we are our own gods and create our own image. 

In The Disappearance of Rituals (2019), South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han traces festivals back to their ancient Greek, ritual origins. Festivals were then an exception to the regular course of everyday life, an interruption, a distinct intertime for contemplation and processing. In the search for the place of theatre, dance, and performance in our current crisis of meaning, the (music) festival/party/club is the ideal context, also to create a shared space with the audience, who are taken along on the trip of the performance. DJ and percussion work together to build tension and pressure through sound and to generate dynamics: aspects familiar from club nights or concerts, but here serving a different purpose.