After All Springville

Miet Warlop, one of today's leading avant-garde performing artists, returns to the Lliure from Belgium. She is back with a show that explodes the imagery of another of her shows, Springville. On the stage, a house belches out coloured smoke. A green man comes out carrying a bag full of rubbish, and leaves it outside. The house is a trampoline, a springboard for the imagination. Are we ready for the leap into the unknown?


Warlop premiered Springville in 2009, and it won best show at Belgium’s Theaterfestival in 2010. It is a madcap onslaight of chaos and surprises in which the scenography, the costumes, the props and the characters interact and merge. It is an amusement park of disaster which has now recovered, like someone who goes back to an old, beloved song with new musicians. In Warlop’s imaginary world, everything is in constant motion, everything is symbiosis and metamorphosis and everything takes on a life of its own, even inanimate objects. It is a dance of hallucinatory, humorous images—like a mute slapstick—which not only seeks visual impact and laughter but also raises questions.

In After All Springville, we find ourselves in a house that is alive with creatures that are half-human and half-thing which lead us to question the physical and mental space we occupy, the effects of our gestures, how we interact with others, how we sand each other in small spaces and how we can form communities if we virtually never see each other. These questions could be tragic if they were not also extraordinarily funny. And in this interstice lurks Warlop’s surprising show for all audiences.