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Grand Theatre Groningen - rehearsals Ingeborg Houwen - video photography (still) : Fleur van Dissel.

Houwen was born in Friesland in the year when “Understanding Media” was published. She is a Dutch scenario writer ((of reality scratching fiction (drama)), and a (performance) artist exploring contemporary life (art) in digital media. Known in the field as author of Diagram Sci-fi Karaoke, she currently designs post technological mixed media with speech & language (technology), moving images in a real time engineering interactive (computer) system. Besides Theatre Science Houwen studied (Language, Emotion, Anthropological) Philosophy, Aesthetics, Theology, and Film at the University of Amsterdam. Her work has been shown in Brazil (File Festival), Croatia (Split Media Festival), Amsterdam (ASU, Felix Meritis/ SMART Gallery), Germany (EMAF). As the founder of IICE her 'target' is to institute a school for creative writing, educating and generating narrative output as both a human social and artistic tool (UKSFU). In the international art field Ingeborg works as Script Consultant and Video Art Maker.

In 1990 Ingeborg Houwen debuted in ‘Het Werkteater’ the Dutch improvisation collective where actors are the author - an experimental theatre project that started in the late (19) sixties. In the late eighties early nineties this format was becoming more and more a tool for social targeting, learning Ingeborg writing and playing for special commissions. This provided an entrance to modern experiment but also paid for University College. Houwen became a Master of the Arts (in Theatre Science) by comparing these (Dutch) theatre experiments with the early modern ideals in art. That study formed a creative diving board for both new media culture and performing arts; fields were Miss Houwen worked in mostly autonomous.


Ingeborg Houwen heeft bijgedragen aan 2 productie(s).

Ingeborg Houwen heeft gewerkt in de volgende functies:


Het gehele overzicht van voorstellingen waaraan Ingeborg Houwen heeft meegewerkt, voor zover geregistreerd in de Theaterencyclopedie:

NB: Bij de carrièreoverzichten zijn de voorstellingen gekoppeld aan de premièredatum. Het kan echter voorkomen dat personen niet aan de première meewerkten, maar pas later bij de voorstelling betrokken raakten.

Curriculum Vitae Theatrum
Productie Functie Producent Seizoen Premièredatum In regie van
A Morality Play Auteur (schrijver libretto, scenario) The Liminal Institute 2000/2001 28 april 2001
Puppet Master Auteur (schrijver libretto, scenario) The Liminal Institute 2000/2001 28 april 2001


Foto's

Overview Picture Stage Registration Spring Dance 2001 (Frascati) - video photography (still) : Fleur van Dissel. Backstage Picture Grand Theatre: Ingeborg trying the Wizard's Cape for a Morality Play - video photography (still) : Fleur van Dissel.

Links: Puppetmaster 2 - Overview Picture Stage Registration Spring Dance 2001 (Frascati) - video photography (still) : Fleur van Dissel; Rechts:Puppetmaster 3 - Backstage Picture Grand Theatre: Ingeborg trying the Wizard's Cape for a Morality Play - video photography (still) : Fleur van Dissel.

Overig

Miss Euroland

Beware and stare / amaze and gaze / the planet is moved by her toe /

Young Miss Euroland / dressed in chemical charism / knitted on histories pins / parades the streets / waves her hand / and greets her many friends / in Spanish German and French /

Hola hela halo / Here speaks the fainting Saint / we are but a piece of paint / in the empire / of a vampire /

Millions of years / it took to be defined / her rotating mind / her mastering of the all / by a wall /

lost in the many / she never had a penny / she's the King's fool / she is but his tool / she is a poet /

to transcend the powers / of this creature of ours / her story was whipped / she banned from the script /

O Heraldry Heraldry Heraldry / Now she serves technology / and has you spin in her screen / travel her cognitive travel / you lazy consumerist devil /

But on she goes Miss Euroland / To with her many friends / throw semiotic harpoon / level up / to the moon /

(Ingeborg Houwen, Puppetmaster Poetry, 1/8 , I-camp, Munich 2000)

PUPPETMASTER / a Morality Play

A liminale Chronicle by Ingeborg Houwen

The Puppetmaster Poetry was conceived only in the fourth stage of the Puppetmaster satellite project , that started on the threshold of the Millennium as an enterprise in art, science and technology of Liminal Institute founders Paul Derksen and Martin Butler. Martin e-mailed me his impressions of the first phase, that was taking place in exchange with engineers of the Media School Cologne . In a super surround staged projection screen of 180 degrees , Martin was invited to dance as he was captured on camera and projected manyfold. He felt like a piece of paint , he wrote. Myself at that (winter) time working in the bombed National Theatre in Pristina without glass in the windows, having to e-mail from a United Nations building, his descriptions seemed like from another world. Back in Amsterdam, early spring 2000, Paul and Martin invited me to come over to yet another technological resort in Germany : the Animax theatre in Bonn. Together with visual artist Erik Frymark the four of us were locked up in a severely technically equipped black box together with engineers and their programs from the Neuro-Fuzzy Logic department of the University of Twente. We were supposed to mediate on tracking software.0 It was producer Marion Hübscher with her one woman's bureau Performance Desk , who saved the project from pre-fab software experiments leaving us all as test rabbits, by transferring the project to the I-camp Neues Theater in Munich. After all, the project was subsidized by the HGIS Cultural Means: ' pocket money ' liberated by the Chamber for innovative projects inside the Arts 1. Back from Bonn in Amsterdam the dancers Sanne Myllylahti, Nicole Beutler, Therese Nylen, Samoli Roininen, Maria Stavenkovich Herranz and (later) Patrick Entat had been selected and I was invited to attend the rehearsals in the rented Vladimir Dance Studio and later Beppie Blankert's studio Doc 2, where Martin was exploring the choreography. Meanwhile, I had been contracted to provide 'texts' that would feed both dramaturgy and stage performance.

The first studio rehearsals remained relatively if not absolutely cleansed from the dramaturgical outbursts that lingered till deep in the night during and after Paul Derksen' s food events, managing to gather the most outspoken bodies around the art of eating . The dancers in contrast were treasured with carefully balanced excerpts of the Liminal heresy. At first , a neat reflection of their art itself. The first Puppetmaster rehearsals were about (new ) dance development or a life time of training, keeping us yet open enough for the cults we were subsidized to explore or so I deducted from Paul Derksen's dramaturgical Reader, which consisted in a collage of magazines from (mostly) El Dorado itself 2.

Only after the Puppet Mastery Poetry was conceived and written during our 4 weeks ( rehearsal ) time in snow white Munich, where we were elegantly pensioned , pacing daily the city before we locked our selves up again in the theatre, on the tribune where I wrote in the dark, as Erik was only designing on his computer ( also ) not yet touching the light machine, but maybe even a day or so before the try out, relatively late in the whole process , but definitely before the costumes arrived, as Joff (the label of Joffrey Moolhuyzen) - who had fled back to Amsterdam to finish the couture and decided Ingeborg in the new circumstance needed a costume too - , so it can't have been that late , but anyway, somewhere after the sonnets were approved as being complementary to the choreography, the idea of me as a lady speaker became an option for sound . The Apple Synthetic Speech Program hadn't worked with the Poetry; it was lacking in prosodic intelligence for starters, missing rhythm and rhyme. The idea of me as a lady speaker wasn't so new , I had been one in Global ™, another spectacle by Paul and Martin. Of course then the texts were cut up and bartered by Paul Derksen, I only displayed a passion for the speech act. But : we weren't going to swap files now, so the decision came completely fresh and new.

We premiered with Puppetmaster in the I-Camp Theatre that was transformed with help of the technicians into a white fashion shoot. I was sitting relatively safe with a microphone and my laptop where it's supposed to be in between the audience in my pink and yellow Tele Tubby 'pajama' as the dancers' solo's were glued by amplification to the poetry figures karaoked by it's librettist. Were they alright with that ? I remember Maria insisting that she was the muse of Miss Euroland. Fine ! It wasn't true but I did it for her, nonetheless, as she was tip toeing forwards from the blue darkness of Erik's super sized projections of echo scanned wombs. Just to be sure : for that memorable world premiere I was emplaced outside the magical square of where the mapping of the dance lay enclosed. Were we as different disciplines also from different worlds ? I didn't think so. There were tunnels. Outside the rehearsals I had been doing yoga with Theresa on the floor . . Besides, the dramaturgy and with that the Puppet Master Poetry was tying us together. Puppetmaster was to be a play on 'belief systems' written in dance and the Puppetmaster Poetry was to become or represent a guru on stage, eventually to be defeated in sound by the DJ . 3 In spite of the taboo on narration in performance -and dance land at that time, sentiments of game like that grew on my presence while all of a sudden in the next stage of creative rehearsals, in the Grand Theatre of Groningen, not only my costume was reversed from within a different creative paradigm ( I was carefully selected not to be a member in ) but the poetry deliverance was to be inserted on to the stage , as well. All the time was taken to examine the artistic decisions. My first rehearsals - a little more than elaborations in sound cheques  ; I was entirely responsible for my role - were outside the dancer's time in an empty set. Martin suggested an entrance and to walk certain patterns criss cross the dancers and, o, he had taken minor editorial decisions in the Poetry that now had become a Script. I remember doing that first rehearsals in the fishnet on a pair of flat Papillon dancer's training shoes and Wojtek flying down the tribune to pass me a pair of high heeled slippers of glass4.

So, no more 'pajama' in Puppetmaster but a black fetish outfit of Wojtek Dziedzek , who had arrived . Paul, Martin , Erik and Wojtek were frantically working on a second show ( A Morality Play ) the rehearsals of which would be starting in yet another venue in Haarlem. In great contrast with the pastel colored Puppetmaster that was largely displayed on Van Holst's ( etherical music ) The Planets, A Morality Play was to become a dark feast of black shiny rubber and plastic displayed on carefully selected electronic trash ('both light and music') , reflecting the idea of a Style Bible the (Western) world was supposed to have been gotten into.

The idea of contrast in costume inside the double bill the show was becoming , worked very well . My freedom was captured however. From then on I was learning lines .

Fleur van Dissel (Visual Communication) had joined the company in the Grand Theatre being asked to register the performance for the Dutch premiere at Spring Dance in the Korzo theatre in The Hague. But she had brought her own hand held camera as well to make impressions of the creative process. Much of the kinetic outbursts that came with the rehearsals were captured by her for eternity 5.

While the performance was growing, the dramaturgy slowly became a belief system in itself. In gallery Mares in Maastricht - where we gave a surprise performance of Puppetmaster - Martin had invited a couple of spiritual experts especially to come and judge my spiritual presence. ( The verdict was positive. ) Although my services as a writer were no longer required, my stage persona was still at present in A Morality Play. I was sitting left on the first plan right in front of a camera and a VCR facing the dancers with my back to the audience - hence the camera and VCR so one could follow my expressions - dressed in the Wizards Cape from Joff's collection, while the nerve breakingly loud and hot steaming striptease show in black was unfolding. Martin was very pleased with the camera performance. He had send the tape to media festivals, but without showing it to us. Little power plays like that, so as to question who was the real Puppetmaster, kept us alert during the many long bus rides and hotel nights during the tour, all perfectly arranged by Paul and Marion. What came as a most disappointing surprise to all, was that the press was largely occupied by my legs as well as the 'content' of the Poetry Performance and the transformation of it's actor in the second set.

Footnotes

  • There is one couplet missing. The poem got bought by a visitor in I-camp in Munich. So he should know.
  • (tracking software) that one year later later inspired me to start the Diagram Speech in Space Scenario Sci Fi Karaoke project .

1 (the Homogenous Group for International Cooperation) SOSM FINALE ( computer document ) containing ¥ € $ Ingeborg's Intimate Cultural Experience's Annual Cultural Accountancy, composed and measured by Doctor Houwen 2014.
2 A place so many went.. Fountain of Youth…hotspots of love and the imagination: ( a private correspondence 2016 ).
3 In Grand Theatre Ivo Boll was invited to perform the battle in sound.
4 Dancing shoes recruited from Atsushi Ogata's street video Ground Zero I had been walking in as 'the dancer' ( Melkweg, 2000)
5 Reminding the UvA Special Collection there is possibly video material to be locked in their tombs. Also my laptop on where the Puppet Master Poetry was worked out is available (if visiting is possible).

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