In the beginning Tarzan was an improvisation event initiated by the dancers/choreographers Gonnie Heggen, Frans Poelstra, the dramaturge Robert Steijn, the visual artist Jacquine van Elsberg and the musician/composer Steve Heather.

Starting point of creation was Tarzan, the film-screen hero, a mythical figure, very physical in his behavior, but also very stylized in his poses. As the only white man in the jungle, he transformed himself from being an outsider into the king of the jungle. By taking him as a starting point of our improvisation we were asking ourselves what he represented for us. Why did this old fashioned icon still fascinate us. What to do with the attitude of white men to think that they can rule the whole world as if it is their own garden. And what about the jungle? We all like to survive in the jungle and trust on our instincts. But what is our jungle nowadays? Is it not also our city life?

XTC or madness

The Improvisation-event Tarzan became an attempt to junglify our surroundings as a travel into the heart of darkness. Dancing and performing in Tarzan became an action between travelling and tripping, xtc and madness. It was also a comment on nowadays ideas about cultivating wildlife, the primitive and the instinctive. Every performance was a step further in defining this world, and the public was a direct witness of what we found, and where we were blocked in finding something.

Tarzan offers the audience and the performers different architectural spaces, connected with different layers of consciousness to dive into. One of the tools to create a context larger than the stage is Keworx, a live mixing cross-media synthesizer, which interacts on the events on the stage live with projected texts and imagery.Tarzan was played in Amsterdam more then twenty times at different locations. The last two times we developped a new format, called Tarzan, the experience. Each night ten people from the Amsterdam dance community joined on stage, what resulted in an hallucinating experience for the participants and the public.

Tarzan transformed into a happening where the performers were forced to surrender to the pulse of the jungle, to shapeshift in different unmanagable creatures, to be in the moment, also when this moment is crazy, unbearable or a significant example of bad taste. One of the challenges of this happenings is that also when they are not creative, they still on stage, just waiting for the moment of inspiration to come. At the same time, the public can relax, because the performers have a preference for some low brain activities and will not bother the public with nasty riddles and sophisticated justifications of what they are doing.