Hotel Modern’s KAMP is one of the most worthwhile pieces of Toronto theatre you’ll see this year
While KAMP (playing at Harbourfront’s Enwave Theatre) is described as a puppet show, I found the effect more like watching a group of children playing in a schoolyard. One of them leads the model train into the station; another unloads the passengers. And in a dollhouse just inches away, the third is collecting the shoes, clothes and eyeglasses abandoned in the anteroom of a gas chamber, the better to process the next batch of prisoners.
KAMP tells the story of a sunrise-to-sunset day in Auschwitz, one of the Nazi extermination camps. Three performers move among thousands of intricate, eight-centimetre puppets, telling the story in short, unspoken vignettes. And through clever use of tiny cameras, their pictures projected above the landscape as a sort of sky, the audience grasps the true, ground-level scale of what is unfolding.
From the theatre’s balcony, these tiny puppets look like exactly what they are: wire puppets attached to boards. But from ten centimetres off the ground, the camera lingering over every face in this enormous crowd, they look eerily, undeniably human.
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