There is a big screen hanging above the stage on which four faces in four individual frames are apparently chatting to each other as we walk in. At the same time two other persons are busying themselves in a somewhat deconstructed space in front of us where this show will be assembled in the subsequent hour and 40 minutes. Though the first association might be a throwback to the life during the covid-19 pandemic, we are quickly reassured that ‘this is different’. It aims instead for an exploration of the idea of the ‘global village’ – famously attributed to Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s when the concept was still predicated on the then analogue technological development. Now, digitally-enabled, this global village is quickly accelerating to well over 8,2 billion inhabitants – the actual number is monitored live in the course of the show and displayed on a digital panel.
The ‘villagers’ sharing their lives with us are six actors from different corners of the globe: flirty Abhay from Mumbai, ‘girl next door’ Christi from LA, fun-loving Okan from Istanbul, Lagos-based pan-African boy Nnamdi, and the Danish double act actress Mette and narrator Katrine who respectively take on the tasks of ‘always playing someone’s girlfriend’ on the one hand, and mediation/ body doubling/ live object manipulation on the other. The actors skyping in from their homes are instructed, they tell us, to play themselves in this piece, which is in fact a film-in-the-making not unlike Katie Mitchell’s live cinema work. Additionally, it is a piece about ‘five different people making sense of their existence’, and they begin this journey by taking their phones around the streets where they live in order to show us around.
The project is created by Danish director Tue Biering who runs the Copenhagen-based company Fix+Foxy. Over the years this unusual outfit has vowed the audiences worldwide with wildly imaginative arts projects that redefine the boundaries of professional theatre. The biggest recent hit was Dark Noon – a retelling of the history of American colonialism in the genre of the Western, made with South African actors in whiteface. This took Edinburgh by storm in 2023, then toured around the globe.
Fix+Foxy began as a collaboration between Biering and dramaturg Jeppe Christensen, when both were employed by the Royal Danish Theatre. Back in 2006, inspired by Naomi Klein’s critique of neoliberal capitalism, the duo had the idea to ‘outsource’ the Danish most performed classic The Elf Hill to actors in Bangladesh who would then be brought to Copenhagen to perform it at a fraction of a cost of their Danish counterparts. This created an ironic metaperspective on the ways of working in Danish institutional theatre and seeded ideas for further works. The following year, under their own steam, Fix+Foxy made a stage version of the 1990 Hollywood blockbuster Pretty Woman with actual sex workers of Copenhagen in the Julia Roberts’s famous role, and the audience itself in the role played by Richard Gere in the film. The sex workers taking part in the piece were paid for the night with box office takings.
Last year, Biering explored another variation of divisions of labour in theatre-making in a piece titled The Berries of Wrath. Here he employed North African strawberry pickers based in the south of Spain to come to Denmark and make a piece of theatre about their lives. In it they taught a group of Danish female teenagers what it is like to work in the fields by engaging them in a series of tasks and reenactments drawn from their personal and professional lives. The ultimate idea behind it was to expand the consciousness of the Western consumer regarding just what it takes in terms of human sacrifice to get fresh strawberries in their supermarkets all through the year. Though this sort of practice has raised questions about the ethics of such collaborations, in an interview he gave me last year, Biering told me that, after some serious soul-searching, he has determined he is primarily an artist rather than an activist or social worker. His work is meant to create nice memories for his less fortunate collaborators rather than claiming any capacity to provide fundamental solutions to their predicaments.
Biering is an extraordinarily generous and open artist whose creative process often unfolds out in the open. He seems fascinated by processes of construction and so his Dark Noon for example started out on an empty set whereby a scenography was playfully built up with the help of the audience in the course of performance. Some of his projects have only one rehearsal with a test audience in attendance before the show ‘opens’, as was the case with some episodes from the box-set performance The State that currently runs site-specifically in various key sites of Copenhagen (hospitals, newspaper houses, university, taxis, yoga parlours). This is a show with non-actors (lawyers, journalists, taxi drivers, social security beneficiaries) telling stories or giving lectures about their relationship to the Danish state.
I was privileged to get access to the very first rehearsal of The Village which, just like the show’s opening described above, also began with the actors simply introducing themselves and their surroundings to each other. This innocent exploration made it wholesale into the final version of the show, and moreover it also produced – seemingly through sheer directorial quick thinking on the spot – the key ‘Romantic Scene’ of the piece. It was clear even on the first day that some homework had been done already – the full technical crew of the show and their equipment were all already in the space, including a cargo of potential props. It seemed as though the actors were already reasonably familiar with each other and the director. And the director already had some clear ideas regarding the skeleton of the show and the relevant contingencies: If anyone’s wi fi connection happens to drop, there is an aquarium in the space at the ready with a video livefeed attached to it to cover up the gap. There would be scenes that explore how one could create togetherness and visual seamlessness across the boundaries of live and mediated co-presence. This would be achieved by creating identical backdrops for actors on screen so Abhai’s carpet observed in the walkthrough of his house is earmarked for making a life-size copy of for doubling purposes in the actual space…
Similarly, the Romantic Scene features a connecting up of Okan’s real-life grass patch by the Bosphorus and Mette’s astroturf in the rehearsal room to make it look as though they are lying on the grass together. Though there was an initial plan for a shared dinner party across the live/digital divide, that scene did not exactly make it into the final cut, but we got a Pool Party instead. There is also a shared camping scene, an airplane trip, a political convention, and a journey into outer space, and when I think back to it, I could swear that after a while I stopped noticing the seams in their simulated co-presence. Despite seeing how it got put together, in my memory, their togetherness is palpable.
There is no doubt that this transmedial ensemble had a warm, playful and generative time together despite the differing timezones their body clocks needed to adjust to. That said, the global village is far from an idyllic place in their collective interpretation. They make no secrets of the dark side of the internet as the underside of digital connectivity, or the intense chronic loneliness that laces this experience, the fleeting charm of technology, the real fears that cannot be assuaged by the simulacrum, the rapid population growth, the actuality of the climate crisis, the rising inequalities which manifest in very different ways in different parts of the world… If anything, overabundance of ideas is probably this piece’s only weakness, and subsequently, this is not a kind of work whose dramaturgy can contain a plausible resolution. But they certainly never lose their sense of humour about it either.
On the whole, The Village is more than a performance or a film-in-the-making as it claims to be. It is a kind of witty and poetic meditation, contingent on our thoughtful co-presence for its sense of closure. And in that way, Tue Biering has found a suitable form to match the content, again.
This post was written by the author in their personal capacity.The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of The Theatre Times, their staff or collaborators.
This post was written by Duška Radosavljević.
The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect our views and opinions.
