Actors change position, women and men swap stances and even voices are exchanged. In this fashion Müller continuously misleads the audience and plays with our expectations.ĭuring the show shifts occur continuously within the tableau vivant. The audience finds itself trapped in a crossfire under a barrage of imaginary bullets, until a screeching piece of fireworks shatters this illusion. After an exchange of ideas about war and violence, exploding bombs and the firing of guns is audible. Müller works in a very associative way to achieve this effect. Using an incessant flow of text snippets, the fantasy of the audience is stimulated and a story is constructed in a very subtle way. In playing with conceptualisation, the production also becomes a treatment of the power of the imagination and sensory experience. Initially it seems like merely an accumulation of apparently haphazard and disconnected ideas but soon storylines begin to emerge and the production attains an unanticipated depth and complexity. A wildly diverse flurry of thoughts shoot past the audience, from heroic to despairing thoughts and from sexual longings to an existential fear of death. The extremely precise and finely tuned text succeeds in melding the fragmentary composition into a resounding whole. The actors – Katja Dreyer, Pere Faura, Karen Røise Kielland, Stefan Rokebrand and Jefta van Dinther – do not play ready-made protagonists. ‘While We Were Holding It Together’ is a game of ‘guess what this is’ quadrupled: the text keeps shedding a different light on the image and compels the audience to keep embracing a different interpretation of the scene. Through these reflections, the group transforms into a family having a picnic in the forest, into a revolutionary cell, into inhabitants of the Alps, including their too tight lederhosen.

Who are they? What are they doing there? One by one, the actors share their thoughts on the situation to the public. Out of the pitch dark, two female and three male silhouettes in static poses emerge: a tableau vivant. This results in a poetic, humoristic and philosophical production that draws the audience into Müller’s personal crystal clear logic. In ‘While We Were Holding It Together’, a tribute to the power of the imagination, she subjects notions such as body, mind and the relationship between the two to a closer inspection. Ivana Müller makes investigative and uncompromising theatre, scrutinizing many concepts and ideas that are usually taken for granted. Philosophical Trip With A Maelstrom Of Images And Ideas

We were here together review