Low Down
Nik is wearing a fur coat under which only his chest hair and a fake pearl necklace cover a thin, naked body. Huge glasses give him the unique appearance of the star type: androgynous, cheeky, sexy but nerdy. He is blowing out blue enigmatic cigarette smoke in a slow motion act of exhalation. These are the ingredients that a pop star is made of.
Review
NIK©#2 is a performance about a cliché but it manages not to fall into the trap of becoming one. Nik keeps his steps, his expressions and his gestures very small. The beat is constant, not over the top. What Nik presents us with is not a parody of the big elements of glamour, but that of the small ones. There are no big gestures, flashy accessories, noisy lighting or special effects. He uses elements of parody―exaggeration mostly, but he exaggerates the simplicity, the silence, the immobility, the distance and the repetition of a single sound. Nik strums a monotonous beat on a bass guitar. Through one microphone he sings in a low voice, through the other he supports his own singing with a mixed background voice. On the screen behind him, a video clip featuring nothing but himself: Nik in the living room; Nik in the bedroom; Nik is smoking; a shadow of Nik; a close-up on Nik's eye; Nik is playing guitar. Nik Nik Nik.
Nik van den Berg appears as the perfect typecast for this role. He manages to keep a cold alienating distance between Nik's star persona and his audience, without appearing arrogant or detached. His sense of timing is precise and his acting is driven by powerful restraint. His appearance is so credible that even when he starts singing in Gibberish it seems as if, at least for him, the words actually mean something. The choice of using Gibberish as the singing language is well chosen. Clichés do not need words. They are so fatigued that they have already lost their meaning. That is what a star is made of. It is meaningless, and it seems that Nik van den Berg knows it well enough to end the performance after thirty minutes. The tension of the performance derives from the question: “where is this going?” And right when you start asking yourself this question it is over, just in time. The performance does not develop. It ends in the same point in which it started. This is the nature of cliché, we might say. There is a feeling, however, that the potential to gradually deconstruct the pop star cliché into the smallest of particles is not fulfilled. It could reach an extreme absurdist point, where even the cigarette, the microphone, the glasses lose their independent meanings. But Nik does not take this opportunity. He chooses instead to cherish the static and the meaningless rather than searching for the meaning of meaninglessness; to portray rather than research. And for a thirty minutes performance it works.
NIK©#2 is a performance that takes risks. The risk of turning into a cliché when presenting one, the risk of being meaningless when dealing with meaninglessness. It walks on a very thin line between entertainment and irritation, as the general tendencies in the audience indicate. Some laugh and giggle constantly, others move uncomfortably in their seats. Those who get irritated might think that they see enough of this ‘pop stuff’ on television; for that they do not need to go to the theatre. But this is what makes NIK©#2 a performance worth seeing because perhaps it is only in the theatre where the components that make up the cliché become visible; and when they are visible the cliché loses its power.
Nik van den Berg appears as the perfect typecast for this role. He manages to keep a cold alienating distance between Nik's star persona and his audience, without appearing arrogant or detached. His sense of timing is precise and his acting is driven by powerful restraint. His appearance is so credible that even when he starts singing in Gibberish it seems as if, at least for him, the words actually mean something. The choice of using Gibberish as the singing language is well chosen. Clichés do not need words. They are so fatigued that they have already lost their meaning. That is what a star is made of. It is meaningless, and it seems that Nik van den Berg knows it well enough to end the performance after thirty minutes. The tension of the performance derives from the question: “where is this going?” And right when you start asking yourself this question it is over, just in time. The performance does not develop. It ends in the same point in which it started. This is the nature of cliché, we might say. There is a feeling, however, that the potential to gradually deconstruct the pop star cliché into the smallest of particles is not fulfilled. It could reach an extreme absurdist point, where even the cigarette, the microphone, the glasses lose their independent meanings. But Nik does not take this opportunity. He chooses instead to cherish the static and the meaningless rather than searching for the meaning of meaninglessness; to portray rather than research. And for a thirty minutes performance it works.
NIK©#2 is a performance that takes risks. The risk of turning into a cliché when presenting one, the risk of being meaningless when dealing with meaninglessness. It walks on a very thin line between entertainment and irritation, as the general tendencies in the audience indicate. Some laugh and giggle constantly, others move uncomfortably in their seats. Those who get irritated might think that they see enough of this ‘pop stuff’ on television; for that they do not need to go to the theatre. But this is what makes NIK©#2 a performance worth seeing because perhaps it is only in the theatre where the components that make up the cliché become visible; and when they are visible the cliché loses its power.
Reviewed by Maya van den Heuvel - Arad 7 September 2010