Оnnо

If, having come to Holland, you should make up your mind to see a perform­ance of the Dogtroep company, finding its venue will be no problem. Ask anyone in the street, and they will tell or show you the way to the place where the Dogs, as this troupe is affectionately called by its admirers, are playing today. Extremely pop­ular in Holland, they are regarded here as an object of national pride. Films and TV-programs are being made about them, and books are being written.

Dogtroep’s performance is an astonishing synthesis of painting, sculpture, architec­ture, music, cinema and theatre. Their palette is full of amazing colors – they use fire, water and wind, as well as various weird mechanisms and special effects based on technologies of the future, which are surprisingly mastered by the company already in the present.

The «Dogs» put all these enjoyable things together with natural ease, the style of their plays being eccentricity and grotesque, and the subject matter being genuine­ness of human emotions in the space of eternal truths.

In their phantasmagorical world any exaggeration, any most incredible metaphor looks natural. At the «Dogs»’ performances no one will be surprised at the sight of man’s hands growing in flower pots and fond of firm handclasps, or of fishes flying in the sky and stuffed with pyrotechnics, or of the sky opening wide, or of houses rising - in a word, of anything most improbable and fantastic that man can imagine, pey call their theatre a ritual theatre, and that may be true, if ritual is regarded as the language of man’s communication with the world of supreme forces, from the forces of nature to the forces of the irrational.

The new play of the Dogs, Оnnо, is an endless blending of illusions and an improbable reality, intertwining in the crazy fuss of urban life. People involved in the non-stop running of the crowds remain lonely and shut up in their world. Оnnо, which is a Dutch first name, is each of us and at the same times no one. It is our subconscious.

It’s difficult to imagine that the sphere of human emotions can be the theme of a street play, as we are used to such plays being based on rather rough means of the­atrical impact. But here the theme is really like that. Funny and serious, stunning by its technical inventions and by unforgettable brightness of its artistic methods, this play makes an impression of something quite unusual, magic, unreal. The only thing that remains real is the world of human passions.