Freetown
reconstructie (video installation)
Leopold Emmen in collaboration with Dood Paard
Are they blaming me for 500 years of exploitation? Can’t they see I’m only human? That it was no free ride for me either? That I’m simply on a payroll and like them in a certain way, just as much a victim of the global system?
Leopold Emmen (Nanouk Leopold and Daan Emmen) have adapted the Dood Paard production FREETOWN to create a video installation.
FREETOWN is about social and sexual emancipation, about power distinctions against the backdrop of a society characterized mainly by oppression and hopelessness. Three women meet up in a resort in Africa where young men will do anything you desire for money.
‘Freetown/Reconstructie’ investigates. In a three-part montage, the play gains a new form; a video wall as autonomous image, the integral piece translated to an abstract studio setting and a frozen, enlarged close-up of the actresses who as onlooker are witness to their own words.
The play, written by Rob de Graaf in association with the actresses Manja Topper, Lies Pauwels and Ellen Goemans, was staged in 2010, 2011 and 2012 at theatres in Holland, Belgium and Germany. In November and December 2012 the play will be performed in theatre LaMama in New York together with two other Dood Paard productions.