Director’s statement

Echo the Now is a film holding ephemeral images of my performances of the last 20 years. Although not created to tell a literal story, the interwoven images now do create an imaginary poem, a story which is more physical than it is rational. A visual history taking its’ own time, in a different reality, where words are of no importance. Where image and sound make us silent.

The idea to make a film inspired by my performances came from the wish to communicate these ephemeral works to a larger audience. I make my performances on very different locations all over the world; however mostly for intimate audiences, and works are only performed once. After a performance the work is gone, evaporated, it can only be experienced in the NOW. It will survive in stories told or in photographs taken. However, these registrations for me never capture the essence of the work itself.

In 2012 after making a performance Ashes in La Reina Sofia in Madrid, travelling back to Amsterdam I thought that it was so little what I took back. Maybe three photographs which could communicate part of the work and my experience. I realized that performance is only a bearer for my images and I could try and investigate to find a bearer more independent of the moment. Not to gain a registration but as an actual translation to a different medium, so I could reach a larger audience and still come close to the experience of the original performance.

With a small film crew, I started to experiment. For my pilot Before and After the Now I took ten performances out of their original location, their time and their audience, to perform them again, in front of the film camera on a different, chosen location.
The results of this experiment were stunning.

All of a sudden I could demonstrate a performance from a distance or very close, materials of costumes and masks became tangible, movement could be captured and a voice could be heard. Physicality of a performance could be even enlarged so the audience could experience the work in all its’ aspects. The desire rose to make a feature film.

I wrote the scenario, guided by my performances. It is my story. A woman looks back at her life. Where does she come from? Where does she go? During the film she liberates herself from everything in life that has been or still is redundant.
This story is a universal story, about core rather than abundance.
Life goes past before one realizes, youth is only there to look back at, innocence of a child unfortunately cannot be hold, we are born in a situation and body which we cannot escape from, if only we could hold on to only the NOW. But we can’t. We can only echo it.

Anet van de Elzen, 14 February 2017