Reykjavík Grapevine - 16.08.2013, Page 39

Dance
The Guy In The Fur Coat
Shitting His Pants
Diederik Peeters returns to Iceland
by Rebecca Louder
If this was not intriguing enough,
Diederik is coming back to Iceland at
the end of the month with a perfor-
mance that will span two partnered
fes t ivals — the aforementioned
Reykjavík Dance Festival and the
Lókal International Theatre Festival.
His piece, ‘Red Herring,’ thoroughly
blurs the lines between the two me-
diums of performance for a produc-
tion that is as confusing as the title
proverbially implies.
Man in a black box
Diederik started his career on an
entirely different track from the hy-
bridization of dance and theatre,
studying visual arts and harbouring
musical aspirations. “It's all a ter-
rible mix-up,” he says, “but since
I'm no good at any instrument, and
much better in pulling faces, I some-
how ended up doing what I'm doing
now.” This meant a gradual shift
from mainly doing video work and
installations to doing strange per-
formances in galleries, outside of
the usual staged context.
Eventually, he decided to set
some boundaries for himself and
took his works into the “black box”
we call theatres. “When I was mak-
ing these weird, difficult to cat-
egorise performances, it was very
cool but also very tiring,” he says.
“That’s when I said, okay I’ll get ac-
quainted with all the elements of the
stage world—sound, lighting, etc.
I'm still figuring it out myself, but
have high hopes to find out some-
day soon now.”
Ten years ago, he met Erna
Ómarsdóttir while the two were
working with theatre director Jan
Fabre in Belgium. This led to her
asking him to perform in her piece
‘We Are All Marlene Dietrich FOR,’ a
work commissioned by the Iceland
Dance Company, which earned him
his local reputation. “My role in it in-
volved me doing a kind of parody of
John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ while wear-
ing that ridiculously big fur coat,”
Diederik laughs. “We were hanging
out at Sirkus a lot and I guess my
dancing style caught some eyes.”
Man against the music
His involvement in that work also led
to Erna extending a personal invitation
to him to come back for the festivals
this year. “She hasn’t even seen my
new piece but she knows I don’t do
crap,” he says. What he is bringing to
the stage is a creation that can simply
be described as a duet between a man
and a soundtrack. “Since I don't actu-
ally know how to make performances,
I decided to take the liberty to fool
around with the typical tools of the
stage in order to find out how to use
and to misuse them,” he says. “For me
set, sound and light are equally impor-
tant tools as text or performers.”
As his previous piece focused on
the dramatic possibilities of a set, in
‘Red Herring’ he focuses on the as-
pect of sound. “The sound imposes
itself as a character, almost physi-
cally, to the point where it tries to
take over the show,” he continues.
“Quite annoying actually...” Dieder-
ik’s dance partner—the sound—will
be controlled by sound-designer
Lieven Dousselaere who was also
part of the production of Erna’s ‘We
Are All Marlene Dietrich FOR’ and
a regular collaborator with her and
her partner, Valdimar Jóhannsson.
Lieven stays at the back of the
theatre space trying to keep control
an entire cockpit of buttons, LED-
lights and faders. “Although we've
performed the show over 20 times
now, it’s still a physical battle for
him to make it to the end of the per-
formance alive, so to speak,” Die-
derik says. “It's equally hard for me
to keep my head above water. I re-
ally enjoy making things so tremen-
dously complicated that it becomes
almost impossible to avoid mis-
takes. It's a form of self-sabotage
that I'm quite fond of.”
Man is paranoid
and confused
Aesthetically, the show is highly in-
fluenced by cinema, which Diederik
says is a much stronger reference
point for him than dance or other
forms of performance. “The gen-
eral atmosphere of the stuff I do is
often considered quite cinemato-
graphic,” he says. He openly ad-
mits stealing the term “red herring”
from the well-known plot device
that acts as a false clue, diverting
attention away from the true culprit
or solution. Citing names like Tati,
Hitchcock and Bunuel, he says the
show takes cinematic cues in terms
of the sound and lighting as well.
Conceptually speaking, he
delved into aspects of humanity
that suffer greatly from false clues.
“Over the last couple of years, I
somehow developed a perverse
interest with intense mental states
or psychological conditions where
reality presents itself differently,”
Diederik says. “In that sense, para-
noia was kind of a starting point.
If one suffers from it, it’s probably
very annoying, but if you take it out
of its clinical context it’s very fun-
ny to watch someone just shitting
themselves for nothing.”
Using the idea of a person vul-
nerable to becoming distressed
over figments of the imagination,
he folded the use of sound as a trig-
ger to increase paranoia. “To quote
good old Luis Bunuel,” he says,
“sound triggers the imagination
more than image.”
He also seems comfortable mak-
ing his audience a little paranoid
before they arrive at the theatre. “I
quite like to get confused myself;
I find it an exciting and inspiring
state of mind. And so I can't help
myself to start confusing the audi-
ence as soon as possible,” he says.
“Let's keep it at this: knowing that
the term Red Herring refers to a
false clue, maybe the title doesn't
have anything to do with the show
at all, and is only there to put you on
the wrong track.” Audiences may
be misdirected, but are unlikely to
be disappointed.
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39
“I really enjoy
making things
so tremendously
complicated that
it becomes almost
impossible to avoid
mistakes. It's a form
of self-sabotage that
I'm quite fond of.”
Diederik Peeters rejects the notion of being a minor cult celebrity in Iceland. Despite the fact
that the claim was made by none other than Erna Ómarsdóttir, one of the artistic directors of
this year’s Reykjavík Dance Festival and Diederik’s former collaborator, he laughs it off as a
“loving exaggeration.” Nonetheless, even the festival’s managing director, Tinna Lind Gun-
narsdóttir, says, “Icelanders remember him as the guy in the fur coat.”