Songs at the End of the World
A pop-singer clad in a giant, red snowsuit, steps out from behind a microphone, strips down to nothing but his Speedo, and transforms before our eyes from an intrepid, Antarctic explorer into a shivering and nervous child awaiting his swimming instructor. This moment, which occurs early in Songs at the End of the World, a “theatre-concert” performed by the Dutch-Flemish ensemble known as Wunderbaum in 2012 at the Long Center for the Performing Arts in Austin, TX, poignantly calls forth the childhood anxieties that haunt our adult lives.
The filmed performance of Songs at the End of the World that I recently viewed on ontheboards.tv begins with an electronic message board broadcasting the announcement, “we will appear very soon”. Supertitles then ask us to imagine “somewhere far away, an endless plain, where everything can be filled up anew” while playfully reminding us “this is all just a metaphor”. In a 2018 interview for Fusebox Arts Festival, Wunderbaum ensemble member Walter Bart explains, “We start a show a lot of time by saying to the audience ‘welcome to our show’. We want to make sure that the audience and we are in the same space. So that we don’t build a fiction and there isn’t a fourth wall where we are on the floor and the audience is sitting there”. Experienced on ontheboards.tv, this serves as an invitation to join Wunderbaum in a virtual space where their live performance is mediated by cameras, microphones, headphones, and laptop. Here, technology brings you so close it creates a remarkable illusion of intimacy and liveness.
Over the course of 90 minutes, the eight-member ensemble of Wunderbaum performs an imaginative song cycle comprised of eclectic pop music, monologue, and dance built on a series of vignettes in which each performer inhabits a character who is at once a child dreaming of being an adult and an adult longing for their childhood. Songs at the End of the World captures all the nostalgia of sifting through a shoebox full of childhood photographs. But a departure from this wistfulness occurs late in the performance when the space explodes into a theatrical, DIY, underwater wonderland. Suddenly, the naked cyclorama is washed in deep purple with streaks of white light. Neon-green ovals form a mobile at one side of the stage that flickers on and off to the beat of the music, while cast members puppeteer giant, clear plastic jellyfish, each suspended by a single string run through a pulley. Clear skirts fluttering, they undulate towards the water’s surface, then descend and start again. The man in the speedo appears, this time in a lifejacket, goggles, and flippers. Lying belly-down on a plank held aloft by a pipe attached to a skate that is pushed along by another performer, he “swims” through the water until he reaches the edge of the stage and then floats back to begin again. The music is euro-pop of the highest order; tantric techno-beats, synthesized harmonies and ethereal vocals repeat over and over again “I don’t want to grow up, thank you.” This is an extended sequence of pure, childlike joy that I confess to re-watching several times.
Although Songs at the End of the World may be a metaphor for “somewhere far away, an endless plain, where everything can be filled up anew”, it conjures a space we can create out of our own imagining; a space where we can dream. Maybe we can’t forget where we came from, but we can always imagine new places to be going . . . at least for about an hour and a half.