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TEXTS AND REVIEWS

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Please note: this is not a traditional family with a “dad-dad and a mom-mom and a weekend-weekend.” They work around the clock and no one turns up their nose at any of the different types of work. While they hammer away at a conveyor belt, put down clanging buckets, wipe tables, and pound away at kitchen utensils with mortars, this family expresses the rhythm of everyday working life in a contagiously musical way. Their angular, harsh body language also makes it clear that this is hard labor. There is even a whip reference to slavery, although neighbors leave it unclear whether the enslaved person here is someone else or the thoroughly disciplined self.
 

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Shoe/Farm – a family business is funny, absurd, and witty in a way that only the work of buren can be, but scenes like this also give it a bitter-sweet aftertaste. Bittersweet because it deals with the precarious existence of every family business, whether it involves growing potatoes or selling shoes. Small family businesses like this shoe store are slowly but surely disappearing. Potato growers are no longer a match for the big French fry producers, and shoe stores can no longer compete with chain stores. buren evokes a world that may have evoked mixed feelings in them as children (...) But such a family business also offers a child a special – revealing – insight into what the world is all about. There is a hint of melancholy in the bitterness: ‘Shoe/Farm’ sketches a world that – like the makers' own childhood – is irrevocably gone.  

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Spare Time Work is an intriguing Gesamtkunstwerk, somewhere between children’s television,

the dark absurdism of Tim Burton and philosophical criticism.

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Spare Time Work enters the uncomfortable gray zone of how we have silently identified ourselves with
certain ideas about work and leisure, without realizing that they are part of a social straightjacket.

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I had many laughs, but was left with the nasty question whether we really want our children to grow up in a world where measuring is the only knowledge. Why shouldn’t play be as well? 'SPARE TIME WORK’ is a nice plea for the latter.

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The way our work is constructed is almost the way a dream functions. The way you act in a dream seems logical, a kind of digestion of many things that are happening in your life, things that you read, or saw
online, or in movies, all get mixed, experiences, sensibilities. The differences between right and wrong,
good or bad, are way more mixed. I think the idea of a dream is a bit like the dramaturgy in our work.

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buren’s arsenal consists of clearly defined characters who each relate in a specific way to the prevailing im-
age of women, polyvalent props that are constantly rearranged and colorful costumes that are equally multifunctional. This in a tightly choreographed performance style that at the same time leaves enough room for playfulness, all topped with a dash of feminist social criticism.

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In buren's world, anything can happen in a Dadaist game of domination and seduction in which the two performers switch between dialogue, song, and dance. The lighting design, sets, and costumes constantly switch between absurd and unexpected situations. “It's like a dream in which you are confronted with your own desires. Reality is never far away because each person is invited to ask where reality ends and the dream begins. Those boundaries are movable.”

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