Chunking is a slightly hysterical, elusive performance. The performers are constantly switching back and forth between presentation (I am) and representation (I am showing). In this way Chunking undermines such
notions as entertainment and anecdotalism. It nullifies anything spectacular, which makes it an extremely headstrong show. The set is a sort of ‘Franz West
meets Mike Kelley’ image, but clumsier in its attempt to present a cheerful picture. When, in this setting, you see Tijen Lawton – dressed in a black satin circus dress with an awfully sad face in fake diamonds sewn onto the bust – swaying her hips with her head in a blue vase and another vase coming out of her behind, you are suddenly confronted with a contemporary version of Hieronymous Bosch. In an age when clarity is demanded from art, and when political messages are considered essential, this piece cannot be called contemporary at all and is
therefore itself essential.
Jan Lauwers, artistic director of Needcompany

Having entered unexpected regions I saw what no eye had ever seen. Nothing is more stupefying: when laughter and reason,
horror and light have become fathomable. ... It gave me a feeling of triumph: perhaps unfounded, premature? ... I awoke face to
face with a new puzzle and I knew immediately it was insoluble.
Georges Bataille, L’Expérience intérieure

The evocative world of Chunking starts where theatre and dance confront the performance element of plastic art. A world where fabulous creatures live, where images and impressions repeatedly shoot past your retina. Images of animal creatures, almost amorphous, of circus artistes, of mad little fellows and odd figures, of sensual, lusty beings who stimulate your desire, of other dimensions where you are immersed in colour and form. A world in which sensuality, the bizarre and the frivolous meet, in which stories appear, but where the story is just one facet of a miraculous universe. A surrealistic world with an existential undertone. Surrealistic because it plays with the imagination, the
spontaneous and the absurd, because of its rebellion against restrictive rationalism. Existential because of its contemplation of such notions as individuality, solitude, freedom and transience.

So, now, we can listen to this story of materialism and its time
As an antique story of men.
It is a sad story, but we will not be saddened by it
Because we are not like these men.
Born of their flesh and their desires, we have cast aside their categories and their appurtenances
We do not feel their joys, neither do we feel their suffering
We have set aside,
Disinterestedly,
Without the least effort,
Their universe of death.
These centuries of pain which are our inheritance
We can now bring from the half-light.
Something has happened, like a second coming
And we have the right to live our lives.
Michel Houellebecq, Atomised (Tr. Frank Wynne)


"Chunking", a city in China. And also, chunking: ‘When one wants to store information in a meaningful way in the memory, one divides it into pieces, chunks, a process which in psychology is sometimes also referred to as chunking.’ (Grace Ellen Barkey, paraphrased from Memories are Made of This, The Biological Building Blocks of Memory by Rusiko Bourtchouladze.) This process is carried on at several levels in this performance. The stage setting is dominated by colourful panels that move and which define the architectural environment. They play on the memory, they manipulate, they direct, they orient the audience, but they also disorient by their ‘overabundance’, by the saturation of their presence.

Images are constructed and deconstructed by means of the panels, music, movements and emotions, always avoiding the anecdotal. What appears is a playing with the unexpected and the unimaginable.

"Chunking" plays on various dimensions of the imagination; references to dreams. But dreams are too limited: "Chunking" transcends this and adopts a plentiful freedom that enables us to enter into imaginary spaces where interwoven time and space prevail.

It may be said that "Chunking" has something of the Japanese adult animated film, called anime. The roots of anime are to be found in manga, the Japanese strip cartoons, but are often more violent. The Japanese animation tradition has an erotic and pornographic category called porouno anime, with several subgenres including ecchi (erotically charged, humorous) and hentai (perverse). "Chunking" can be situated on the boundary between these two.

Without exact borders, the song rose up, staked a claim on your attention, fears or desires and then turned into air.
Greil Marcus on Sonic Youth’s Kill Yr. Idols

The subconscious is like a dormant volcano and Chunking is your ‘wake-up call’! "Chunking" plays with the subconscious. Imagine: you are in a car going at quite a speed. Suddenly you feel the urge to open the door. Just like that, an intense urge, though you are aware of the danger. An ambiguous feeling shivers through your body, on the one hand the urge that appears in your imagination and transcends reality (opening the door), and on the other the realisation of the danger involved.

The unsaid, that which is not revealed, is expressed in mysticism, and also in absurdity.
Grace Ellen Barkey

"Chunking" stimulates. "Chunking" stimulates your senses and your emotions. Colour and movement carry you along into a sensual universe. "Chunking" is a lusty circus, full of humour, where an absurd lightness holds sway that transcends rational thought.

So, ungentle reader (as you and I value what we should be ashamed – after witnessing a few minor circus-marvels – to call our
‘lives’), let us never be fooled into taking seriously that perfectly superficial distinction which is vulgarly drawn between the
circus-show and ‘art’ or ‘the arts’. Let us not forget that every authentic ‘work of art’ is in and of itself alive and that, however ‘the
arts’ may differ among themselves, their common function is the expression of that supreme alive-ness which is known as
‘beauty’. This being so, our three-ring circus is art – for to contend that the spectacle in question is not an authentic
manifestation of ‘beauty’ is as childish as to dismiss the circus on the ground that it is ‘childish’ is idiotic.
E. E. Cummings, The Adult, the Artist and the Circus. Vanity Fair 25 (October 1925)

Elke Janssens