Knock Down The Entrance Door Of The Cinema - Performance Situation Room Amsterdam

by Esther Arribas and Matías Daporta

In Knock Down The Entrance Door Of The Cinema artists Esther Arribas and Matias Daporta are making a movie. The audience is watching two of their recently made performances (South, and Funerals, welcome)  but are finding themselves at the same time on a film set, in which they operate as extras. Besides directing the film Esther and Matias thus also appear as artists (themselves) in the movie, that tells the story of Georgia – a murderer that kills artists. Knock down the entrance door of the cinema is a thriller that you don’t watch but become part of. Uncanny as it is, with this interview they held with ‘us not being us’, it already starts.

HET VEEM THEATER INVITES THEATRE MAKERS TO MAKE MOVIE

We, theatre makers, are interviewing Het Veem Theater (we are providing the answers as well):

WeTM (We theatre makers): When did you decide to start producing and presenting cinema?
TIWWTHVTWA (This Is What We Think Het Veem Theater Would Answer): In his book Expanded Cinema (1970) Gene Youngblood predicts a future where film evolves towards a new era where reality is real as the simulation (of reality). Today we are experiencing the expansion of 3D cinema and an increasing presence of advanced virtual reality technologies on the market. This demands from the art of cinema to expand and become more complex. Taking this into account one should reconsider the apparatus of the theatre as well. If there is something that becomes more real than real, what will performance have to offer?  Youngblood states that art has to escape from mass entertainment; Art should be an invention of a future where new information systems regenerate, both ancient and modern worlds. Het Veem Theater is a moving, expanding art house that gives space to satisfy that urge for regeneration and transformation.

WeTM: Why did you choose two theatre makers to direct a film?
TIWWTHVTWA: Actually, the proposal came from them. We saw the piece they did together for Matias’ graduation show and we invited them to present it again but, unexpectedly, they came with a new proposal. Their suggestion was to create a self-curated event, a double bill, in which they would present two performances of their previous works as an excuse to make a movie.
It is ambitious, but we find it really interesting for our venue. We like to constantly expand and to challenge the means of a production house for performance: we have produced performance, dance, visual art installations, we launched books, organized concerts, and even became a club a couple of times! Even in the quality of thriller, their piece will work also as a mockumentary about us, about how we work here. Hopefully it will make the space more alive and visible for other audiences, since the publicity will be directed to also cinemas and film students.

WeTM: Het Veem Theater it is not a venue famous for presenting big dramas or pieces based on human emotion. Have you chosen thriller as a marketing strategy?
TIWWTHVTWA: Not sure we agree on that. Het Veem Theater can be really exciting and emotional, but not in a commercial way. Not every emotion brings with it tears or noisy laughter’s. Anything that we do produces emotion, so why do we have to set up a hierarchy of emotions that we link to specific genres, and stay only in one stage of the pyramid? Esther and Matias wanted to do a thriller movie and we opened up to them.
What the piece produces, products or results, is not what this theatre is interested in, rather it’s affects. What we take from Esther and Matias is the way of curation and exploration that they propose and all the implications it could have in relation to the outside world.

WeTM: But still, maybe it is not so clear for your audience. Could you be a little bit worry to lose part of the loyal audience of Het Veem?
TIWWTHVTWA: In HVT we look at each new production independently. If you had some problems with one of the works, it should not be representative of what you will get in the next events. We work with a wide variety of artists and their proposals are very different, just check out our website to find out a little more.
Furthermore, we really trust Esther and Matias, they are a little bit crazy and you can get lost sometimes talking with them, but at the end, it all makes sense.

We are derribaslapuerta, group of theatermakers (in progress) by Esther Arribas and Matías Daporta.

Matías Daporta (ES): I have always been interested in combining different media. I have been dancing since I was little, yet did a study in architecture and moved to fashion design after that. I did some dubbing, but ended up graduating from choreography, although the school was not just about choreography. In my practice all these experiences meet. I look for new ways of spectating, by creating new mechanisms of attention, and alter the way spectators empathize and relate to each other. As society transforms, I find it important to constantly seek answers to the question of how to experience theatre in the twenty-first century.

Esther Arribas (ES): Already as a little kid I started dancing and shortly after I also began to draw. Once I graduated as graphic designer I couldn’t help making a typography to write dance. Something in my understanding of dance shifted after kissing 15 people for 8 hours a day during a whole week. Then I moved to Amsterdam to study choreography. With the intention of blending these two fields (dance and design) I encountered an important fact: it was not about walking between two points but between a thousand more. One of these is cinema, cinema knocked my door quite recently, I embraced it, and it became an important reference to mirror choreography.

Knock Down The Entrance Door Of The Cinema is a coproduction between Het Veem Theater, AGADIC and Axencia Galega de Artes Culturales (Galician Agency for Cultural Arts). With the generous support of AFK (Amsterdam Fund for the Art), CA2M/La Casa Encendida (Madrid) and Antic Teatre (Barcelona). Knock down the entrance door of the cinema is part of the Life Long Burning (LLB) project, and supported by the Cultural Program of the European Union.