Arts Centre Vooruit, Ghent, Belgium

As a spectator you are familiar with the trick of ‘Viewmaster’, but that does not keep you
from a childlike enjoyment of the mirror magic

Old silent films are often nothing but silent theatre: the static images immediately give away the fact that the sets are just painted canvasses. But it did not take filmmakers long to figure out that they could do more with film. Film images can totally absorb the spectator, and make him feel as if he is living the action himself. Back then, frontal images of an onrushing train really scared the living daylights out of the spectators.
Even though we have lost that kind of naivety, we still are more easily taken in by film than by theatre. In film we completely disappear, whereas theatre makes us very conscious of our own position, literally and metaphorically.
The nineteenth century theatre makers, with Wagner on top, also tried to really suck their
audiences into their plays. What they really wanted is make a film, except that the medium did not exist yet. It is no coincidence that Wagner’s music is a forerunner of Hollywood music scores.
In their search for heightening the reality-value of their plays, directors developed
outrageous tricks that later on also made their entrance in cinema. They would for instance use glass surfaces and have ghosts appear on the stage. With the right lighting, glass can indeed be both transparent and reflecting. In this way the image of a ‘ghost’ standing in the wings could magically mingle with the actors on stage. Today we think of this kind of theatrical pranks as corny. Theatrical realism is no longer
required when films do the job so much better.

The installation and performance of Heike Langsdorf and Ula Sickle show what theatre is indeed good at – and better than film too: showing how constructed, fictitious and even
abstract film images really are. The ‘Viewmaster’ is a box with a glass view-finder the at one side. A second, diagonal glass plate divides the box in two. A sophisticated lighting makes the slanting glass plate oscillate between transparency (and therefore invisibility) and reflection, on a very strict rhythm. At times the slanting glass plate is a mirror and a window at the same time. In that case, the events on either side seem to occur in a shared space.

The American Dan Graham has been experimenting with mirror effects for years. But this work is of a different level, even if only because of the time-rhythm imposed by the lighting. The audience is free to explore the installation, but it is also a place for Langsdorf and Sickle to go ahead and respond to the ghostly nature of the glass construction.
A try-out demonstrated the chances that are created in this way. As a spectator you are -
familiar with the trick of ‘Viewmaster’, but that does not keep you from a childlike enjoyment of the mirror magic. And yet, time and again you are reminded of just that. When you see a near-total blend of the image of the two women, you also realise that every spectator in his own particular position has a slightly different view of the effect. When they have their apparent conversation (being on either side of the glass), the appearance of every intimate theatre and film scene is exposed as merely an effect. But effect, it seems, is exactly the stuff we thrive on.

www.demorgen.Be