Playing Soldiers at the Edge of Imagination. Hotel Modern and the Representation of the Unrepresentable

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With their performances The Great War (life in the trenches during the First World War), and Kamp (Auschwitz), as well as their short video History of the World Part Eleven, the Dutch theatre company Hotel Modern raises important questions concerning the core of the claims that some events cannot be adequately represented, or should not be represented at all. Hotel Modern uses theatre as a critical vision machine, in order to undermine seemingly self-evident modes of looking; they confront us, their audience, with the way we are implicated in what we believe we see. Hence they suggest that resistance to representation might in fact be a manifestation of what Alain Badiou has called the ‘passion for the real’.