MADELEINE
Concerning fake memories
by Thera Jonker

Whether traumatic or sweet, memories tend to be cherished. Fragments of the past are able to fill a head to the brim. Emotions from the past are liable to cloud our view of reality, superimposing a phantom world upon it.
Why doesn’t physical recollection suffice for human beings, as it seems to do for animals?
The production madeleine by Jan Langedijk and The Perpetrators (De Daders) is about memories that can hardly be called traumatic or sweet. They are fake memories.
It is about behaviour as a collection of distorted habits.
Physical acts that are disconnected from their usual function and meaning are a well-known phenomenon in The Perpetrators’ theatre productions. With them, walking is never merely walking and simply sitting down is something unheard of. Walking and sitting are part of a composition.
In madeleine, three men and two women are apparently moving purposefully about an office, though in fact they do so without any purpose.
Initially all of them act individually, with no contact between them.
The people on stage are searching. Is it perhaps for the event behind the movement, for the emotion underlying the habit?
Gradually the search becomes compulsive and starts to dominate the people. Where at first certain actions are connected with certain individuals, they now start to intermingle.
A noise previously made by the one, occurs at the other who, while at it, also adopts the corresponding activity. Thus, one is able to start experiencing the performance as a piece of music.
Gradually the search subsides. Only the music of the action itself remains. The individuals cannot help abandoning themselves to it.
As a spectator, madeleine can take you along on a search for the memories and meanings behind an action. You are able to experience what a compulsive, painful, frightening and bizarre venture it sometimes is. But by their behaviour, the players also invite the audience to try and step into a web of habits for a while. In order to experience events that are most certainly defined by the past, but from which the emotion has been drained. In order to participate in a sensoriness of current hearing and seeing. And in order to become part of one great musical composition. Perhaps you might be able to sense something of a cow’s bliss in madeleine.

a review:

Performances by the extraordinary mime company De Daders (‘The Perpetrators’) always remind me of boys’ books, and particularly of passages describing adventurous enterprises with aeroplanes or cars in which ‘man and materials are put to the severest test’. Also their latest production Madeleine, memories III is about the interaction between man and machine. The production is teeming with sounds that, in our digital era, we last heard a long time ago: the delicious rattle of a typewriter plus its attendant little tinkle bell, a dust cloth being beaten out, the sliding drawers of steel filing cabinets.
The title Madeleine refers to the famed biscuit which the first-person narrator in Proust’s cycle of novels Remembrance of Things Past dips into a cup of linden-blossom tea. This brings on a stream of reminiscences. The biscuit does not crop up in the performance, but all sorts of objects that awaken memories in the audience certainly do. With Madeleine, mime artist Jan Langedijk and his company have created a show in which nothing happens and certainly nothing is said. The stage setting consists of a hotchpotch of cupboards, tables, a typewriter, an empty bird cage, a waste-paper basket and a filing cabinet. With all of this stuff, the players set to work. An actress whistles to get the little bird back into its cage. Another player lures the escaped bird with grains of corn. Jan Langedijk moves about between the objects in profound reflection, as if, on the spur of the moment, he has to come up with something to keep the show going.
Music maker and sound creator Murray Campbell’s melancholy violin provides the most beautiful moment. He gets all objects to sing and produce Geräusch. Because the sound and its source do not coincide, an alienation arises between the act and the act’s effect.
This company creates gratifying theatre on the subject of wonderment. Tables float through the air, tearing up a newspaper sounds like a Mozart tune. The creators seriously and above all dedicatedly demonstrate their naive outlook on the world, as if for the first time they are making a cup of tea or trying to get a vacuum cleaner to work. Which, by the way, they do not succeed in doing. But what De Daders do succeed in is getting the spectator to experience the world uninhibitedly again, as a puzzle of auditive and optical impressions. And that is something truly special.
(NRC Handelsblad)