A fantastical truth | Ernst van Hoek | Performance

A fantastical truth 

A review of the performance of 14 May

Imagine a horse with giraffe- sized legs contemplating life on the moon. Imagine two paradisiacal birds on their 6 inch heels, dancing the night away. Imagine a 

field of sunflowers crying out Pavarottis O Sole Mio, like tomorrow is never promised. A dreamy world, yet strangely familiar. The skies‘ color pink, growing greener every sec- ond, then turning yellow in the night. Purple shiny scales leap out of the water. They morph from fins into arms, then disappear into the wild current. You blink your eyes twice. The world is upside down, but gravity seems not to exist. Whilst you skim across the skies, everything sud- denly seems so clear. Reality isn’t that real after all. And a dream less imaginative then you thought. When Virginia Woolf magically bent time and gender, in her iconic and daring diary Orlando: A Biography (1928), she stretched the importance of the story to be both ‘truthful’ and ‘fantastic’. The contradiction could not be more absolute. Yet reality is not so black and white. The margins wider then we thought. More colorful, queer and wonderful. Metamorphoses become a constant state of being. Shape- shifting is survival. Shifting imagination into truth. Our memories might be fictive and fiction our present state. 

A myriad of paralel fantastical worlds are our reality. 

text by Ernst van Hoek