German premier

Hearing is a sensory organ that we have blind faith in. What happens when what we hear contradicts what we see? What is true and what is invention?

Four persons produce a radio play in »flus«. They generate noises, scraps of sentences and music in apparently casual sequences. What comes into existence apparently without a context, free of meaning and stored live in a computer and it turns out to be a highly dramatic sound document.

De Daders casts a glance in this world, our world where sensory impressions are mounted. Perception is manipulated and »truth« is produced. And the more enlightened and professionally this is done, the entertainment, advertising and news are presented with more feelings and charged with more emotions.

The director Jan Langedijk, born in 1957, stands for a different development in the Dutch theatre of body and motion that may clearly be called intellectual. He studied at the mime department of the Amsterdam college of theatre to 1986 and since then he has been producing one piece a year. In 1989 he received the Dutch mime prize. The piece »a fields guide to imaginary behaviour« became famous that De Daders created with John Maynard Smith in 1999 and where the happenings in video and on the stage were fascinatingly interwoven. The multifaceted spectrum of the Dutch dance and theatre scene was especially the model for free theatre crossing the borders of genres in the 80’s all over Europe. However, there are only a few ideas for social-critical artistic work in the sense of making the (individual and social) body the centre of criticism. This is where Langedijk moved up to being a precise analyst. His theme playing with perception and his question is: where are people located in the flow of media images and sounds?

»flus« shows sophisticated intellectual body theatre, humans in interaction with technology, how body and spirit interweave with audio-visual media. »flus« is non-psychological theatre. However, the piece still has a lot of psychology and emotions. Or, we might better say: what there is of this in the piece is not on the stage, but in all of our heads.