For Part I of this review, go here.
Yet again, I find myself at the edge of Amsterdam, at the theater of Likeminds in Amsterdam Noord, for my Visit #3 of Welcome to Asbestos Hall. Once more, I’m moved by the project’s conceptual layering, what choreographer Trajal Harrell refers to as “process art”. Dramaturg Sara Jansen echoes this idea during her introduction to our group of curious visitors, framing Visit #3 through this lens.
Upon entering, each visitor receives a paper tag with a number between 1 and 6. After Jansen’s introduction, the suspense begins. Groups are quietly called and escorted elsewhere, leaving the theatre as a kind of holding chamber: books on a table, a barren stage before us, a bar in the foyer. People chat quietly or flip through glossy books. The atmosphere feels suspended, weighted with equal parts of perhaps boredom and vague anticipation.
The numbered selection evokes dystopian images, and The Hunger Games comes to my mind. There’s no real danger here, of course – people do return from the unknown – it is seemingly only a practical solution since the rooms where the performance takes place are not large enough to host the audience in its entirety. This is in contrast to Visit #1 where the audience sat in a circle around performers in the central theater space. The sense of shared intimacy is fractured into isolated journeys. The waiting hall becomes a threshold, separating the known from the performative unknown.
Finally, I’m in the last group. We ascend to a windowless studio. A chalked circle marks the stage. We stand at its edge. A performer stands motionless, face pressed to a free-standing wall covered in reflective silver film. Nearby, a table holds stacked white hand towels in a triangle. Then, the lights are turned off and Billie Eilish’s everything i wanted begins to play, softly melancholic:
I had a dream
I got everything I wanted
Not what you’d think
And if I’m being honest
It might have been a nightmare
To anyone who might care…
Sound takes over as vision is intentionally denied. The performer begins to move, struggling near the wall, sliding up and down its surface as if contending with gravity itself. Their body seems unstable, resisting uprightness. The dimness disorients. I strain to see more, but I am left with fleeting impressions. Frustration sets in, not at the work itself, but at my sensory deprivation. The choreography remains largely hidden. My ears become my eyes.
The layering of sound continues. Other tracks blend with Eilish, but her song returns insistently, providing the only real narrative anchor. Offering an inner landscape of dream, despair, and dissociation. Though I’m not frightened, the idea of a nightmare begins to creep in, reinforced by the song’s lyrics. Are we supposed to be in a nightmare setting? This recurrence transforms the music into a kind of emotional compass, potentially anchoring us in the affective space the visuals refuse to provide.
The performer eventually sits against the wall, then stands and exits. I notice flickers in the reflective surface. As we exit to the second room, I finally spot the source: a small screen tucked beside the towel stack, showing a fleeting aerial image of a pine forest which could have gone easily unnoticed. The image lingers in my mind, mysterious and unresolved. What is the forest? A memory? A refuge? A warning? The pairing of a sterile setup of the stage and organic wilderness evokes a post-human juxtaposition: internal collapse set against an indifferent world that will outlive us. The darkness, the refusal of vision, the recurrence of the word nightmare. It made me think about the current climate crisis and what’s often said: that we’re already living the nightmare scenario.
The second studio contrasts sharply. It’s flooded with light, windows open to the evening sun. The stage setup is similar: chalk circle defining the stage, reflective silver wall, stacked towels on a table, but the floor is littered with what looks like pills and vomit. These details alter the entire experience of the choreography and the performer. Cleanliness gives way to abjection, and light doesn’t offer clarity but exposure, further reinforcing the feeling of a nightmare which seems to be impossible to wake up from. Where the first room felt murky and dreamlike (or nightmarelike), this one feels raw and used. Darkness disoriented; brightness confronts.
While only getting a vague impression of the choreography in the darkness of the first room, this time, facial expressions are visible. The performers’ clothes are disheveled, and their eyes roll back in their heads. The struggle against the free-standing wall suddenly gains a whole new dimension and potential interpretation. While the first room could have been seen as hinting at ecological collapse, especially due to the images of the trees, this time it feels like the notion of nature has imploded on itself. It is an inherently human setting, reminding me of the aftermath of a party where people have overused substances of some kind. At one point, the performer mimics vomiting – something even leaves their mouth. Are they sick of the world? Or is the world itself unwell?
Although the two rooms invited different interpretations of the performance, they were undoubtedly connected. The same choreography was performed twice, and the setting was partially the same but with different details. Perhaps it’s the context and not the content that shapes how we read the work, and therefore the framing that does the work of enhancing the interpretation of the choreography. In my search for narrative or coherence, I’m struck by the piece’s refusal to explain itself. At the end, we were invited to write on the silver-coated wall, and the only word that came to my mind: Sick.
Unnur Hlíf Rúnarsdóttir is a master’s student in International Dramaturgy at the University of Amsterdam.
Students of the University of Amsterdam’s MA International Dramaturgy and MA Theatre Studies visited the Holland Festival and rehearsed different ways of reflecting on what they experienced there. The explicit experiment was developed and supervised in collaboration between the coordinator of the two MA’s Ricarda Franzen and the education department of the Holland Festival, represented by Flora Dekkers. The question of which ways of “giving back” and reflection between academia and prospective work practices as dramaturgs might be adequate to the corresponding performances was the starting point of a trajectory spanning the Holland Festival. The students chose each two performances which they attended, all of which ground-breaking in their unique ways: American Trajal Harrell offered a format of attending “work in progress”, Michel van der Aa’s work experiments with AI and opera in novel ways and Carolina Bianchi already won several awards with her second part Brotherhood of her trilogy on femicide, rape and violence.
This review was first published by the Holland Festival, reposted with permission.
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.
