Miet Warlop isn’t afraid of being too on the nose with the opening lyrics of her performance One Song. “Run for your life / ‘til you die,” the lines go, setting up an hour of superb absurdist performance that makes visceral the inescapable human race against time. When this boisterous and downright overwhelming show premiered at the Festival d’Avignon in 2022, it received exuberant accolades, with The New York Times calling it “one of the best performances of the year.” As part of the Crossing the Line festival, One Song had its much-anticipated US premiere the first weekend of October at NYU Skirball.
This pop-concert-meets-sports-game counts a dozen performers: a group of musicians dressed as athletes, a single cheerleader, an on-stage audience seated in bleachers that alternately cheers the musicians on and heckles them, and Warlop herself as a mumbling referee. Their performances require the strength and stamina of professional athletes. A double bassist lies down on a gym mat, playing his instrument while doing sit-ups. Another performer plays a synthesizer placed so high, he needs to jump up and down to reach it. The parts of the drum set are scattered around the stage, requiring its player to dash from snare to hi-hat to cymbal in order to beat out his rhythms. The vocalist sings while running on a treadmill.
Most striking of all is the violinist (Elisabeth Klink); in a performance in which one simply does not know where to look, she commands your eye as she bows her instrument while doing squats and leg lifts atop a balance beam. While both the violin and the gymnastics apparatus carry an innate elegance to them, this show exudes a jarring brutality. As exhaustion inevitably overtakes the performers, it’s the violinist who proves that this group of athletes is very much a team. She fills in for the double bassist as he takes a brief break, playing the heavy instrument atop the beam. She even covers for the worn-down drummer, sprinting around the stage to hit the various drums. Yet even she is not entirely immune to fatigue; eventually she screams, vigorously throws the drumsticks into the audience, and returns to her station. Nobody gets the chance to catch their breath for too long—neither the performers nor the audience—throughout Warlop’s meticulously thought-out chaos. All the while, a metronome placed center-stage dictates the tempo of the music. Its relentless, eerie ticking forces us to consider: are we running out of time?
One Song is Warlop’s answer to the question, “What is your history as a theater maker?” posed by the Belgian playhouse NTGent for its set of commissions, Histoire(s) du Théâtre. For One Song—the fourth of the series—Warlop harkened back to the concept of her first performance piece, De Sportband / Afgetrainde Klanken (The Sports Band / Toned Sounds, 2005), a requiem for her deceased brother that combined sports and music in a similar fashion. As in One Song, its performers exploded with energy until they were brough down by exhaustion. In this freshened-up take on the earlier work’s themes and form, the runner sings, “Knock knock / Who’s there / It’s your grief from the past… Grief is like a liquid / And it never goes away.”
This song, played on a loop in slightly varying tempos for the show’s entire hour-long running time, comes at you just as hard as grief does. As death does. As life does. It’s right in your face, unapologetic and relentless. Whether the tempo slows or speeds, there’s nothing to do but keep up with the pace. At one point, the vocalist (Wietse Tanghe) desperately has to deflect ping pong balls launched at him from a machine on stage. His paddle doesn’t ricochet away everything that comes at him—who gets out of life unscathed, anyway?—but he never stops running. Nor does he stop singing when the on-stage audience heckles him, pushing him momentarily off the treadmill.
As fatigue takes over, and time runs out, the performers scream in frustration. One by one, they collapse, until all that’s left is the sound of the metronome, a painful reminder that time will inevitably run out for each of us, even for those with the most endurance. Until then, one must go on. What choice does one have?
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