Peeping Tom makes a guest performance with Triptych in Munich

National Theatre, Munich
April 17, 2024

During the Bayerisches Staatsballet’s annual ballet week in April, the Belgian Tanztheater company Peeping Tom appeared in a guest performance with their full-evening piece Triptych.

Gabriela Carrizo and Franck Chartier, who founded the company in 2000, are inspired by filmmaking and every piece they do is situated in a specific location. A combination of three separate pieces created for Nederlands Dans Theater, The Missing Door (2013, by Carrizo), The Lost Room (2015) and The Hidden Floor (2017 by Chartier), Triptych (2021) takes place in three different rooms on a cruise ship, and is presented like a drama in three acts. According to the program it is about a man who looks back at his life or into the future, mixing what was with what could have been, and thereby revealing his inmost fears and anxieties.

The story focuses on relationships and, although the action defies the logic of time and space, we are throughout the piece, brought back to the reality of life on board. A green flickering starboard light appears as you would see it from afar on a troubled sea. A steward and a maid weave in and out of the action, busily cleaning and tidying up, seemingly oblivious to the dramas unfolding around them. The engine hums, the steel hull screeches when diving into the waves. There are also quiet moments with music, as when the maid, having cleaned the luxurious cabin, lies down on the freshly made bed and reads a magazine.

In the first piece, The Missing Door, we find ourselves in a room full of doors. The characters are introduced: a man and a woman in a troubled relationship. Her attempt to help him put on his jacket turns into a flickering fight in which the jacket seems to take on a life of its own. He forcefully wrestles a book from her lap while she sits quietly reading in an armchair, to then start kissing her feet and becoming increasingly amorous. At times he tries to leave the room, but the doors do not budge no matter how hard he pushes or pulls. Yet, at other times, people do spill in and out of them, seemingly following the rolling movements of a ship in high seas.

The Lost Room is the strongest part of Triptych. It takes place in a luxurious cabin. We see the woman again. She cringes at the sound of a crying baby and turns to the wardrobes, which she opens. Out spill a bunch of people, like ghosts from her past. Although present, the man is oblivious to all this, and when she runs out of the cabin onto the deck and jumps over the railing, he just quietly closes the door behind her. He lies down on the bed, watching a couple making love, but whether he is witnessing his partner having an affair or whether it is a dream, you cannot tell.

Not really knowing, whose story you are watching and the constant need to interpret what is going on trying to understand it, in a sense turns you into a kind of co-creator, and makes this piece so interesting.

Shortly before the final part, The Hidden Floor, situated in one of the ship’s restaurants, the weather turns bad. People float in through the doors and are washed from side to side to the sound of steel grinding on rock. It comes to a still and water fills the floor. The ship has run aground.

The shipwrecked people slide around in the water, although it felt a little too organized and aesthetic for the chaos one might expect following a shipwreck. Then, for no apparent reason, someone throws liquid from a cannister and sets the ship on fire. A stomach-churning scene follows, when a man disposes of the dead bodies by shoving them through a porthole. It ends with two women sitting with a dead body, that green starboard light still flickering.

The nine performers were absolutely fabulous. They were in complete command of every physical expression from daily life movements such as dusting an armchair, to the slight shaking of a body flooding the stage in despair, to the miming of the rolling of the ship, creating the illusion that the stage floor was moving up and down. In the duets the dancing at times turned into acrobatics, the women flying backwards over the heads of the men.

At the end of the performance, I wondered why Triptych felt so different from other narrative dance works. Maybe it is because in ballet, contemporary or classical, the story always submits to the movement vocabulary of the choreographer. Peeping Tom stresses that they do Tanztheater, so the reverse is the case: every movement acquiesces to the story. The company certainly succeed in creating great theatre with movements so expressive that words are superfluous.