Eveliens PodiumPraat

Gezien: Kolmaskop van Guillem Gefaell Alsina
op 25 juni bij IT’s Festival in Amsterdam

Geschreven voor International Young Makers in Action, www.iyma.eu

Eight sailor robes hanging from the ceiling, a sewing machine on a table surrounded by more robes and one actress: that’s all Guillem Gefaell Alsina and his crew use in the performance Kolmanskop. During the performance, Laura Tamayo Franch shares with us in Spanish, standing behind a microphone, how and when she started to question her own identity, by telling personal and metaphorical stories. Her stories become more beautiful and impressive when she starts to move around. The verbal also becomes physical and visual when she rearranges and plays with the robes as if they represent parts of her identity.

Laura addresses several aspects: personal stories, history in general, conversations with her mother, death and the elements such as water and earth. They all represent fragments of the journey she had to take in the search for her identity. The name Kolmanskop is a reference to a ghost town in Africa that was run over by the desert. A reference that adds more depth to the performance for example about the loneliness you can come across when you question your own identity and how you sometimes must surrender to it. Parts of the text are repetitious and poetic, for example at the point when she tells us how you must let the desert look at you, to help you find your peace and truth in yourself.

There are so many aspects addressed, too many to give each aspect the attention it needs for the performance to have a definite core or for it to become reflective. On the other hand, you could say identities are also complicated and not clear. Altogether Alsina and his crew show us that by combining the different elements of theatre, he can ‘tell’ more than a story and ‘show’ more than a picture, what makes Kolmanskop a textual and visual attractive performance.