Villanella and Hanneke Paauwe have forgotten that a gentle tug at our heartstrings is far more effective than an attempt to induce a full-on cardiac arrest. Rather than heeding the old adage that holding back tears is more effective than bawling, Rendez-Vous goes straight for the jugular. For all that the experience, which involves lying in a coffin, is one of extremity, the balance is upset by a text that tends towards over-directness.
After going through a small waiting-room/decompression chamber experience that involves leaves a thumbprint and shoes behind, you step into your own lying in repose. An empty room dotted with lilies in the centre of which sits a coffin, your coffin. At least, it’s temporarily yours.
That, in itself, is almost enough. Lying there, oddly comfortable and yet slightly disconcerted, you can’t help but reflect on life as you’ve lived it. What follows – a poetic interrogation that requires no spoken answers – seemed like overkill. To beg such questions as the quantity and quality of tears that might be shed, whether or not you’ve given more than taken or left indelible traces behind is to hanker after certain effects too strongly. Yes, it leaves itself open to individual responses – and doubtless others will have been profoundly affected by the inquisition – but it also puts itself at risk to a certain cynicism.
In its delivery, there is a nice ambiguity to the text, which leaves just enough space between questions to hover been enquiry and rhetoric. Often, just at the point where you feel the need to fill the silence with an answer, the text fires in another question. Other questions jangle around your head without needing to be verbalised. At the same time, there’s an irregular awareness of giving yourself away with a twitch here and a reflex reaction there. Your reflection feels etched all over your face.
Personally, I found the whole experience too naive to cut through my reflexions about life. Rather it became, for me at least, about my relationship to death, particularly an inclination to fetishize my funeral. What does it mean, I kept thinking, that I endure insomniac nights by eulogising myself, picturing facebook tributes and funereal crowds of familiar faces? To be confronted with a genuine echo does something to carve up the self-aggrandisement of those thoughts. Indeed, there’s something deeply warped and jarring about a Polaroid of your own corpse.
For the most part, however, Rendez-Vous is content to leave you wallowing in your own over-embellished perception of yourself, whether for better or worse, richer or poorer, in pity or in pride. It’s not about you, but your idea of you and that is, I suspect, either too comfortable or too uncomfortable, but never a blend of the two.
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