‘PEOPLE ARE ABLE TO ADOPT ONE ANOTHER’S MEMOMRIES’
An interview with Jan Langedijk about sound in his theatre productions
by Marijn van der Jagt

Carting along enormous quantities of stuff and ‘home-made’ bits of scenery – that is the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of your performances. In recent years, sound has become increasingly important in your work. When did this start?
Jan Langedijk: I have always found sound kind of important. I used to have lots of music in my productions, though one always had to be able to hear the noises the players made on stage as well. Music was especially composed for Sur Place(1995), Sela(1996) and Dikwijls(2000), and performed live in the production.

So, though you were interested in sound, it was not electronic. As yet the computer did not play a part in it.
It was always a question of acoustic instruments, for I didn’t know a thing about electronic music. And that hasn’t changed, you know. I can manage to listen to a cd with electronic music, but I don’t think it will do for the stage. The way those musicians stand behind their computers – it’s as if they’re answering their email. I am just interested in acts and actions; in my performances, one ought to be able to follow what someone is doing on stage.

So what gave you the idea to include the computer so explicitly in your work?
Since my production Echo(1993), I’m fascinated by what I call ‘indirect influencing’ or ‘remote control’. One might take this rather psychologically, but I like to give shape to it in a very physical way. For instance, an event at one side of the stage may have an unforeseen effect elsewhere.
During a workshop held by STEIM at the Amsterdam theatre Frascati, I was introduced to the computer programme LiSa (Life Sampling), which can record sound and reproduce it at some later point in time. All of a sudden I recognized that this also results in a kind of remote control, but in this case in time, not in space. So now we have stopped making complicated constructions with ropes and pulleys, managing it via a computer’s processor instead.

How did you assimilate this discovery in your productions?
In flus we for instance played a little game with the recording and retrieving of sound.
In the beginning, all was clear: something was being recorded and then you could hear it again. But at a certain point, things started to get mixed up. As a spectator, you no longer knew which sounds had been produced ‘by accident’ and which deliberately. Actions that seemed off-hand nevertheless appeared to be accompanied by recorded sound. You no longer knew where your loyalties lay: with the image or with the sound, with your ears or with your eyes.

And what about madeleine, your latest production?
Here, the game of recording and retrieving is more abstract than in flus. There we played with sound in connection with a radio studio. In madeleine it tells you something about the way in which memory works. The way memories can start to determine your behaviour, and the fact that people can adopt one another’s memories. I’ve experienced this myself. For a very long time, I was convinced that we once had a monkey at home. It was not until I was eighteen or twenty that I realized that this was quite impossible. My father had fought in Indonesia during the ‘police actions’ of the Dutch forces, and somewhere in a photo album from these days he’s seen with a monkey on his shoulder. And as a little boy I projected this monkey onto our home, believing for ages that it lived with us. But then I started to count and arrived at the conclusion that it was simply not possible. He had this monkey on his shoulder at the end of the Forties, and I was born in 1957. Nevertheless, I still always picture this monkey in our home. And it’s a well-known fact that there are people with traumatic experiences – from the war, from an incest situation – who have merely heard such things rumoured. So, people are able to pick up memories they never experienced. That is quite confusing, as memories are very important for your identity. You derive your identity from your history, from the things you are familiar with, the things you know. The things you have actually experienced.

A tool box for knocking things together with
More about the computer programme Pure Data
By Marijn van der Jagt and Jan Langedijk

During the studio performance Chamber Plays (Kamerspelen), in 1998, Jan Langedijk for the first time worked together with the musician and sound artist Murray Campbell. Murray Campbell also collaborated on the last three big productions of The Perpetrators. In all three of these, the manipulation of sound played an important part. The computer programme Campbell used for this was Pd (Pure data), running under Linux.
He calls this a ‘set of tools’, a kind of tool box by way of which you can assemble a structure of assignments and conditions.
During recent years, Pd has been used in an increasingly complex manner in The Perpetrators’ performances. In dikwijls, the programme was operated behind the scenes by engineer Paul de Vrees. The programme distorted the sounds of the guitar and banjo played by Paul Pallesen.
In flus, Murray Campbell operated the computer on stage, while playing with the sequence of the recorded sounds. Campbell was central to the performance.
In madeleine, the computer has been programmed in such a way that, during the performance, it is no longer operated via a mouse or keyboard. It is provided with all commands by switching simple drawing-room lamps on and off and by (contact) microphones. All of the players on stage are able to give such commands. So there is no central control, no almighty engineer. On stage, there is a network of operators. Together, all the triggers on stage constitute a regular ‘minefield’ as regards the possibility of activating a sound recording or of retrieving it. In this mine field, all performers influence one another. One performer may trigger a sound that is part of someone else’s act, and in this way trigger that player’s action.