Hollow Men – Hel’s Kitchen

This dance performance was based on a poem of T.S.Eliot about the meaning of emptiness in everyday life directed by Hel’s Kitchen (Helmut Van den Meersschaut and Einat Tuchman). This piece questions the lifestyles of people and the rules and codes related to it and how this is acting like a mental and physical prison.

For this project Stijn made – in contrary to the emptiness of social life – the environment, the furniture and the house come to live. He had to record hundreds of unrecognizable sounds of objects and classified them by sound quality and property. Next to this material he used the noise of the transmission of a radio (white noise, the empty space within radio frequencies) that were brought alive with effect processors to let them sound as a crowd of people, as water, as a jet engine, etc…
The sound palette was used to lively support and contrast the performance with a four-channel speaker system.