Emotional and analytical Out of the Blue angles its diving goggles towards deep sea mining
19.7.2024
We often dream of distant planets and galaxies. One step at a time, we push ourselves further and higher. Faster. More efficiently. Although we continuously try to jump into the distance, some aspects of our own planet have also remained uncharted. The bottom of the deep sea is still largely riddled with mysteries and now that is exactly where the mining companies are turning their attention to.
Emotional and analytical Out of the Blue is one of the international performances in the Main Programme of this year’s Tampere Theatre Festival. On the stage are two performers, Silke Huysmans and Hannes Dereere, who are connected via satellite from their apartment to three different ships in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. One of the ships belongs to a Belgian mining company that is conducting the first industrial scale test of a deep sea mining robot. The second ship is full of independent marine scientists, and the third belongs to the global campaigning network Greenpeace, which has arrived to protest the test and raise awareness of the matter.
”For us, these three ships represent three pillars of the public debate around deep sea mining: industry, science and activism. You could say that all three agree on the fact that the world is in need of change, but disagree on their visions of how this change should come about. This is what the performance explores further”, the stars of the performance state.
Storytelling, not the objective truth
Out of the Blue concludes Huysmans’ and Dereere’s trilogy about mining. However, their previous works Mining Stories and Pleasant Island tell their own stories, so the audience doesn't have to worry about catching up with the plot. What these works have in common, however, is that the creation process starts with self-made research work done by the duo. This was the case with Out of the Blue as well:
”Our work starts from a documentary or journalistic research. This means that we begin by having conversations around a certain topic with a lot of people, from different points of view. The recorded sound of these conversations then becomes the main element with which we create our theatre pieces. What comes out of this process however remains an artistic project, and is not a documentary or a news piece. The end result is a theatre piece in which we (Silke and Hannes) bring together these recordings through a process of live editing on stage.”
The mentioned live editing process is quite relevant to the performance, as it is used by performers to create an impression of self-created and constructed narrative for the audience. Usually the editing part, such as cutting and pasting pieces of audio, image, or media files, is hidden from the audience in the finished work, but Huysmans and Dereere want to bring this process on display during the performance in a performative sense. The duo does not want to convey the impression that they are the voices of truth or news anchors who, in the name of objectivity, tell how things are. Instead, they put together a story that is framed in a certain way. In addition, the viewers play quite an important role as well: what do they themselves think about the subject of matter?
Room for reflection
According to Huysmans and Dereere, the audience’s own reflection on the topic is essentially important, as deep sea mining is still a developing field of industry. Truthful opinions can be difficult to form, as we still know very little about the seabed. New species are constantly being discovered, and the effects of mining on these organisms are yet unknown. Precisely for this reason the pair wants to highlight the different viewpoints of industry, science, and activism in their performance, so that the viewer will be left with room to think about the phenomenon with an open mind.
Huysmans and Dereere think that one’s own reflection and absorption in mining after the performance is not only meaningful, but also necessary. The performance reaches its effectiveness when the viewer opens the internet after the performance, gets to know the topic in more detail and tells their friends about what they have just learned.
All in all, the dive to the ocean floor has been fascinating, according to Huysmans and Dereere, as they say that their own relationships with the ocean have always been quite distant, like for many other people as well. The reason for this is quite simple.
”From land we can only see a small part of the ocean that lies along the coastline, and of this small part the only thing that we can see is the surface. So when we look at it from the land, most of the ocean is hidden from our sight. I think that's one of the reasons why we've always held a fascination for the ocean because it is something which is part of our planet, but remains a bit mysterious and unknown”, they phrase.
Out of the Blue on TT Frenckell on Wednesday 7 August at 19.30 & Thursday 8 August at 16.00. | Duration 1h | Performed in English | Buy tickets from Lippu.fi online shop.
The article is based on an interview with Silke Huysmans and Hannes Dereere.
Interview and article by Miro Leppäsalo
English translation by Miro Leppäsalo & Elli Juola