Choreographing with subwoofers

Performance artist Anthony van Gog wants the spectator to feel what is happening in the bodies of his performers. Festival SPRING will premiere his new production, The quiet. In search of connection and freedom.

By Mirjam van der Linden

He could just as easily have been an astronaut or a Buddhist monk. Because besides a career as an actor, these were the life paths Anthony Van Gog aspired to as a high school student. After reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead and half a year of physics, astronomy and mathematics in Utrecht (‘the study background of the man who controlled a robotic arm on the International Space Station’), he opted for the bachelor's degree in performance at the Maastricht Drama Academy at age 18. He concluded that in 2019 with Breathing Piece, a 40-minute ‘breathing score’ for himself and fellow student Maarten Heijnens. Source of inspiration: a hyperventilation attack.
At festival SPRING, the now 29-year-old performance artist presents his third production since graduating: The quiet. With his soft Flemish accent and careful way of speaking, Anthony comes across as friendly and thoughtful. His surname, without the famous painter's ‘h’, has led to endless jokes about his ears. ‘Yes, I still have both.’ These days, he is studying again. Philosophy, at the University of Antwerp, his hometown. ‘Great philosophical works can touch me like art touches me and, like art, give me a new insight into the world.’

Amazement without formula
Anthony grew up in Riemst, just across the border from Maastricht. Considering where he is now, you do secretly wonder what kind of child he was, there in that farming village. The composite family was large with, apart from a sister of his own, four stepsisters and three stepbrothers. Some of them were half-Omani and Muslim. ‘It was enriching to have different cultures in,’ Anthony says. ‘Yet I was not that different from other children of my generation. You filled your days with homework, playing outside, gaming and a lot of online communication. I also liked to be involved with fashion. I played hooky to go shopping in big cities. Or to go to McDonalds.’
A performance he saw at DOX, Utrecht's platform for talent development in the performing arts, changed his course: ‘This is what I want!’ Of choosing the arts, Anthony has no regrets: ‘There is a link between astronomy, Buddhism and art. Call it ‘the wonder of the world’. The artist has that in common with the astronaut leaving Earth and the Tibetan monk meditating atop a mountain. But in both astronomy and Buddhism there is a kind of reduction of life, a running away from life. In Buddhism, you have to follow a very dogmatic path to achieve mind expansion; in astronomy, the wonder of the universe is reduced to formulas, engineering and technology. I came to realise that art is freer. There is no formula for it. Art tries to grasp the vital, the complexity, the ambiguity of life. With philosophy, you can then think about that more deeply - systematically and methodically.’
Philosophy, according to Anthony, ‘puts a bottom line’ under his work. On Day 1 of rehearsals, he walks into the studio with an AH bag full of philosophy books and gives a lecture. ‘That one must be pretty incomprehensible and yet funnily enough we refer back to it regularly in the following weeks.’

Live in space
Studying performance, that was a leap of faith. Anthony: ‘I was super young, didn't really understand what it was. Everybody is making ‘performances’ these days. The term has been popularised. That's why you have sound performances, movement performances, theatre performances, lecture performances and so on.’ Indeed, performance sometimes seems to be a label for everything we can't quite put our finger on. Performance art has a (century) long evolution, first mainly in the context of visual arts, later also in the context of theatre and music. Non-conformist, with live actions by the artists, interdisciplinary, and audiences being part of the concept: these are just about the most steadfast characteristics. Even this description still leaves a lot of room for interpretation and interpretation.
The performance course in Maastricht is embedded in a theatre course, and in retrospect Anthony is very happy with that. In guise, and this sounds deceptively simple, performance to him is: ‘making something live, in space.’ Anthony: ‘You are in an environment and you change that constellation. That is your medium, very bare in other words. Making theatre is also creating from scratch. With light, sound, text, play, movement, you are essentially just shaping reality yourself in what is initially no more than a black box. But when you place something in space, you have to relate to it if you want to keep your audience captivated. Many performance artists don't understand what tension is. I am always building and releasing tension, and I do that through sound, light and movement. I do not follow the dramaturgy of a particular story or narrative, but seek my own dramaturgy using these elements again and again.’
Anthony researches all these elements before ‘building’ a piece in the studio. He usually starts with the sound research ‘because sound determines the atmosphere of a piece and therefore has a lot of impact.’ After breathing in Breathing Piece (2019), in Heartscore (2021), the heartbeat of the two performers coloured the space, and in crowdkill (2023), that space filled with a broader palette: a combination of ambient sounds coming from audience members coming in, walking around and sitting on the floor, and sounds made by the performer as he moves. Not only visible, explosive movements such as wild rolling could be heard through microphones, but also minimal, almost invisible movements of muscles tightening and relaxing hard.

Feeling through sound
But sound does not only define the atmosphere. For Anthony, sound is above all a means of bringing the audience close to the performer's body. ‘To me, movement is about physicality. Not about steps or sequences of steps, as in a lot of dance. I look for physical sensations, such as heartbeats and muscle tension. I try to ‘externalise’ these, make them palpable, using light and sound.’
Strikingly, and by now a trademark, the body sounds thump out through subwoofers as low bass. ‘Toef toef toef. The whole room vibrates with it: the light, the ground, the spectator's chest. You feel what the performer is doing.’ Apart from the fact that bass tones resonate deeply and are therefore extremely suitable for making a physical appeal to the spectator, Anthony also experiences a mystical dimension in this type of sound: ‘The bass can be anything. It comes from below, from low, and can be quiet and earthy, but also menacing.’ So is there still a link here with the monk in him and the humming, low-frequency sound heard in deep meditations?
At least in crowdkill, the dominant sound worked evocatively and alienatingly. It draws your attention to the performer's skin and the world behind it, but also makes you wonder who or what that body is. An independent entity, with the performer as the plaything of an inner force? What drives the performer, what happens in his body? Anthony: ‘Martin Heidegger argues that hearing is the origin of being, our first moment of understanding. Other philosophers start from speaking a language, or from the body or the metaphysical dimension, but so he looks for the beginning in sound. Super interesting!’
Because the visual aspect of a performance is also of great importance to Anthony, the subwoofers always form a powerful visual element in the space. As a frame around the playing floor, or - as in De Pont, museum of contemporary art in Tilburg - stacked into a tower, or better: a rock. Here, Anthony responded with live action to Beatriz González's War and Peace exhibition. Among the paintings, his black object was not out of place, refuge for anonymous performers dressed in black hoodies.

Sharing intimacy
With The quiet, Anthony wants to go one step more minimal in his quest to make the invisible palpable. In this new piece, with three performers lying on a raised platform, he puts his magnifying glass on experiences such as fever, chills, insomnia, fatigue and excitement. The publicity text speaks of ‘the quietest movements of the body’, of ‘a still life in motion’. The subwoofers will reclaim their role and a performer's skin will be ‘painted’ with light. For this, experiments have been carried out with a special lamp in which each pixel can be controlled separately.
The choice of stillness has to do with the current era. Anthony: ‘It's a bit of a publicity text, that ‘still life’, but of course there is a grain of truth in it. The world is overshadowed. There is so much going on at the moment and at such a rapid pace. In the process, we are also increasingly ‘forgetting’ our bodies because of digitalisation and medicalisation. We communicate online - including us now, you from Amsterdam, I from Antwerp, very convenient, notwithstanding - and if our body is not doing well, we put in a pill or a syringe. We hand over our bodies, ourselves.’
By zooming in even further on the body, Anthony hopes to give performers and audiences a strong sense of connection - a shared reality. Because, he says: ‘In all my performances, I look for what people share. And our greatest common denominator right now is the body, especially the most intimate experiences like sleeping and dreaming. Everyone sleeps and dreams. And although I sleep and dream differently from you, I believe that paradoxically there is a certain universality in those kinds of extremely private and intimate moments.’

Limited shelf life
Seeking to connect with the world around you by looking beyond the boundaries of the private and intimate has a high degree of freedom in it. At least: that's how it feels when you hear Anthony speak. Besides connection, freedom is also literally a word that recurs regularly in the conversation. In recent years, Anthony has been supported by PLAN, an alliance of 11 cultural partners in Brabant, and works under the wings of DansBrabant (Tilburg). For The quiet, WArd/waRD is co-producer. A concept he has been circling around for a few years now is the ‘selfless body’. That too seems like a call for freedom.
Anthony: ‘Absolutely, that's right. Contemporary discourse is extremely about identity. Who are you? Identity is put down as something static, something ‘solidified’. I don't agree with that at all. Human beings are flexible and capable of saying ‘no’ to anything. You change with life, I don't believe there is a fixed core in us either. The nakedness and receptivity we have as babies run on. I hope. Your roots start at birth and from then on the world is open to you. The search for your roots is essentially something limiting.’ And then, laughing: ‘This interview is going to become a portrait and then make up my identity. “This is Anthony van Gog.” Disclaimer: limited shelf life. In a few years, I will most probably think differently again.’

The quiet plays 20, 21 & 22 May at Theater Kikker during SPRING Performance Arts Festival, 14-23 May, Utrecht. See: www.springutrecht.nl.

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