Performances At City Center At the Philharmonic ‘Th

in N.Y.C.

Review: ‘Are We Not

Drawn Onward to New
Era’ Stages a Disaster in
Reverse
The Under the Radar festival kicks off with
an allegory about climate destruction by the
Belgian provocateurs Ontroerend Goed.

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A performance piece by the Belgian company

Ontroerend Goed features the actors, from left, Karolien
De Bleser, Michaël Pas, Charlotte De Bruyne, Kristien
De Proost, Angelo Tijssens and Jonas Vermeulen. Sara
Krulwich/The New York Times

By Alexis Soloski
Jan. 6, 2023

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A

woman. A man. A tree. An apple. So begins
“Are We Not Drawn Onward to New Era,” a
performance piece by the Belgian
provocateurs Ontroerend Goed, presented
by the Brooklyn Academy of Music in
association with the Public Theater’s
Under the Radar festival. In the show’s first
minutes, an apple is plucked and eaten, a
paradise destroyed. Then the story
changes.

For nearly three decades, this collective

(its name is a Flemish pun that translates
loosely to “feel estate”) has goaded
theatergoers, sometimes gently and
sometimes (“The Smile Off Your Face,” “A
Game of You”) less gently. “Are We Not
Drawn,” directed by Alexander Devriendt,
falls on the milder end of that spectrum,
even as it functions as an allegory about
climate destruction.

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After the apple is devoured, the tree that

held it is torn apart by one of the six actors.
Not everything in the show is entirely real;
the tree very much is. On opening night on
Wednesday at BAM Fisher’s Fishman
Space, audience members groaned as he
ripped branch after branch. If I’m honest I
groaned, too — that poor defenseless
sapling — even though there’s currently a
Christmas tree in the corner of my
apartment slowly turning into tinder. Soon
a rainbow of plastic grocery bags, the kind
that have recently been outlawed in New
York, litters the stage. (OK, fine, I have a
few of those in my apartment, too.) Then
the smoke begins to billow.

This first half-hour, which ends with the

stage strewn with trash and filled with
smoke is ugly, deliberately, and just a little
unintelligible. There’s sparse dialogue
throughout, rendered without supertitles.
The non-Belgians in the theater will
probably assume that it is Flemish. (I did.)
It is not. This is one more show in which
the troupe toys with its audience, though
here it displays better than usual
sportsmanship. To say more would ruin the
show’s central surprise. But remember that
its title is a palindrome, a type of wordplay
in which a word or phrase reads the same
backward and forward. So after advancing,
the show must then reverse. “Are we not
drawn” is a parable of disaster, but run the
tape backward and it instead promises
repair. Paradise, it suggests, can be
regained.

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But if the ideas are wobbly, the

craftsmanship is astonishingly sturdy. The
ensemble works with incredible precision,
selling gestures and movements that might
otherwise seem bizarre or arbitrary.
Nothing here is arbitrary. Each step, each
syllable has purpose. And each is set to
William Basinski’s “Disintegration Loops,”
a composition that is designed to
deteriorate.

Maybe it doesn’t pay to think too hard

about the show. Unless you’re a fervent
believer in carbon capture and probably
even then, the odds that humans can
remediate the ecological harm they have
done seems slim. The show acknowledges
this, winkingly, as brute realism gives way
to something closer to magic. (There are a
few other winks, too. At one point, sparks
fly, literally, courtesy of what looks like a
mini circular saw.) I’m ultimately not sure
if “Are we not drawn” is hopeful or
hopeless, a hymn to human endeavor or
futility. Certainly it celebrates what a
committed group of artists can achieve.
Isn’t that enough?
Are We Not Drawn Onward to New Era

Through Sunday at BAM Fisher’s Fishman Space,

Brooklyn; bam.org. Running time: 75 minutes.

A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 7, 2023, Section C,

Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Paradise Regained,
When Played In Reverse. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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