Born in the Flanders in 1978, Miet Warlop graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent and grew to become one of the most influential contemporary playwrights. She collected award after award with her debut show Huilend Hert (lit. ‘the crying heart’). Whether she works on visual arts, theatre, or performance art, her style is all about mixture: in her works, we can appreciate different languages beautifully coexisting, and often, spoken word is the last in order of importance. Her After All Springville: Disasters and Amusement Parks is the tragic story of a failed community depicted with cartoon-like levity. At the centre of Springville is a cardboard house that shoots plumes of coloured smoke – a platform for imagination bringing about surreal creatures, like a dining table with human arms and legs, a green-clad man jumping out of the window to take the trash out, an electrical panel on the verge of explosion, underdeveloped human figures. Miet Warlop stages a highly choreographic work of great visual impact, a work that has actors become part of a perfectly functioning mechanism of collisions timed down to the last second. It pays to add that most actors cannot see what happens on stage, which means the audience also must judge the play with their ears, and not with their eyes only. On stage, irregular intervals separate different mini-catastrophes, in a crescendo of surreal substories, until long coloured pipes open on top of the audience, some quickly some slowly, in an uncontrolled finale that will make us wonder where all of this is going. An amusement park-shaped disaster.

Featured image: After all Springville – Photo Reinout Hiel