[03/30/04] After Walk Cat, Walk!
at Junge Hunde festival #5

The play starts out with three actors on a podium staring tensely at the audience. When they start talking, it is like they are giving answers to inaudible questions from the audience. The play develops into an innovative mix of a personal interview, a Hollywood parody, an artistic panel debate and a therapy session for superstars. In Transiteatret’s play art is spread like lime onto the catwalk. The artist equals the superstar as ”an ordinary person”. The result is a rather funny and coquette trio of actors in a hasty debate on their easy-going “truths” and narcissistic perception of life.

Besides nearly embarrassing scenes where the stars are selling their trivial soul agony as deep philosophical reflections on art, a plagiarizing reconstruction of a Hollywood war movie scene is presented. The live musicians reduce the original epic orchestra arrangements to ridiculously simple melodies, and in this way strip down and show the heroic story of self-sacrifice, courage and true love as an absurd construction. And in this manner – overwhelmed by the dazzling bombastic expressions – the seductive rhetoric is deconstructed and torn apart. Also the emotional ”autobiographic” stories told by the ”superstars” throw a parodying light onto the self-referring art theories from a creator who considers the consumer’s ”emotional experience” to be the most important part. Theories that leave behind only the framework of art, where souls and personal traumas or profound theories of nonsense try to give authenticity to the work of art.

In this way Transiteatret collects a double victory. Firstly , by putting two separate layers of meaning onto each other, Walk Cat, Walk! challenges the incorrigible sovereignty that emotions have in the media industry, where the agony of one single hero justifies an entire war. On the other hand the play gives an analysis of a phoney debate culture, where the ingredients of art is reduced to square yards of cultivated artificial green in our own ”secret gardens”. The artistic process equals in these moments the very most individual autobiographic proclamations. In this proclamation the original Hollywood rhetoric melts into seductive authenticity discussions among contemporary artist. With its innovative use of today’s commercial formats and in addition to magical in-between scenes, Walk Cat, Walk! has become a theatrically sophisticated and analytically sharp piece of theatre.

Elke Van Campenhout, printed in "Etcetera" no. 90, Brussels-Belgium, February 2004. (After Walk Cat, Walk! at Junge Hunde festival #5, Antwerp, December 2003.)
Translated by Anstein Bleikli