It’s always good to look at the story from a different perspective.
The truth is rarely pure and never simple, and often, it takes a medley of voices and points of view to get the full picture. Particularly when living in an internet age, where perspectives are often skewed and we live in echo chambers, it becomes more important than ever to consider events with nuance before making a decision.
Belgian documentary theatremakers Silke Huysmans and Hannes Dereere know this all too well, where they’ve spent almost a decade researching and making theatre out of various mining phenomena and the involved parties, exploring livelihoods, the industry’s impact, and its future with The Mining Trilogy. The first of these, Mining Stories, is of particular importance, not only kickstarting their series, but also concerning a dam collapse taking place near Silke’s home in Mariana, Brazil.
The result was one of the world’s worst mining disasters, with a terrible flood destroying several nearby villages, along with producing a slew of poisonous sludge polluting the river Rio Doce. To make sense of the disaster, Silke and Hannes travelled to Mariana to collect interviews of those affected, before returning to Belgium to delve deeper and interview experts on the subject, from an activism researcher to even an economics professor.
In any other theatremaker’s hands, this might have resulted in an outpouring of complex emotions and personal stake in it. But rather than doing that, performer Silke chooses never to speak during the show, not even to introduce herself, instead prioritising the voices of her subjects, played through recorded audio, with the transcription projected on various screens around the performance space.
Mining Stories is very much an exercise in literacy, in part because the majority of the audio is in Portuguese or heavily-accented English, which would require the audience to spend the majority of the time reading the translations onscreen. Without video footage, our attention is focused entirely on the voices we hear and words we see, trying to imagine in our mind’s eye what these people could look like as they are being interviewed, based on their accents and inflections and tone.
As much as it becomes easy to villainise Samarco, the mining company, in presenting both sides of the story, we also become aware of how at the heart of it all, everyone seems to be caught in a lethal cycle of capitalism. The miners in fact, want business to resume in spite of the risks and damages, because it’s all they have to rely on for a living, and we consider the greater systemic structures that make it hard, or even impossible, to put an end to mining, regardless of how harmful it may be. Mining Stories then goes beyond simply presenting views, but seems to suggest that there are far greater economic forces at work that we have no control over.
Throughout, Silke maintains a stoic, unmoving face, only performing by arranging the screens at various points, or utilising foot pedals to activate the voices of the experts. By making herself a key part of the performance, audience members are hyperaware of the very deliberate process of construction and editing that goes even into a work like this that purports to present all sides of the story. At one point, one of the experts assures Silke that she is free to do whatever she wants with these recordings, and Silke demonstrates this by presenting snippets at a time, recontextualising their words to form imagined dialogues that work in tandem with each other, rather than in its purest, unfiltered form.
In that sense, Mining Stories also fulfils the second meaning in its title – that Silke and Hannes are literally also performing the act of mining through their method of making theatre. Interviews are but the raw material they use to form their show, and are carefully curated to form a narrative. There’s a reason why ‘history’ contains the word ‘story’ after all, where it’s a sequence of events shaped and given structure by man, which imposes a specific narrative on them through such organisation.
The experimental style of Mining Stories doesn’t always work – the cacophony of voices, rarely given a name or a position to attribute them to, does become confusing at times, or the issues they delve into do reach rather complex levels that range from the philosophical to the academic, that don’t necessarily resonate or work in tandem with each other. Elsewhere, we hear Rihanna’s ‘Work’ interspersed with the voices of Samarco, or the familiar, perhaps comforting, sound of a Skype dial tone, to add moments of levity between this otherwise heavy topic.
But at the heart of Mining Stories, there is a very clear, simple message it wants us all to know – We must be aware of situations on both a micro and macro scale to make sense of things, rather than simply be reactionary and base our thoughts on our emotions alone.
As we end off with a personal letter from Silke’s relative, we understand that as far away as we may be, we are all deeply interconnected in ways we could never even imagine, and it takes this realisation to even begin initiating change. Far too often, both the personal and the global tragedies collide, where the pain felt by the world has reverberations across smaller communities everywhere.
Photo credit: Tom Callemin
Mining Stories ran from 28th to 29th July, Pleasant Island from 2nd to 3rd August, and Out of the Blue from 5th to 6th August, all at the Esplanade Theatre Studio.
The Studios 2023 runs from July to September 2023 at the Esplanade. Full programme and tickets available here
Production Credits:
| Created by Silke Huysmans, Hannes Dereere Performance Silke Huysmans Dramaturgical Advice Dries Douibi Technical Support Christoph Donse Scenography Frédéric Aelterman, Luc Cools Portuguese Transcriptions Luanda Casella, Miguel Cipriano Production Kunstenwerkplaats Pianofabriek, Bâtard Festival Co-Production KAAP Supported by Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie, Sabam For Culture Thanks to All Conversation Partners |
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