Michael Laub is somewhere between Brussels and Cambodia when we connect via video call and the first thing he wants you to know is that he’s not a European theatre academic. Nor is he another art-house darling mining Southeast Asia for exotic material. Not even, despite four decades of critical acclaim and retrospectives, particularly interested in being taken seriously.
“People often confuse me for an academic,” he says, “but basically, I have a punk sensibility.”
It’s a telling opening from the 72-year-old Belgian director and choreographer, whose work has been labelled “post-dramatic theatre” for decades by critics and scholars. He’s preparing for the Phnom Penh premiere of Portrait Series – Snapping 2025 / Snap Dance at the French Institute of Cambodia (IFC) this week, following its debut at an urban festival in Battambang on November 3.
The multi-screen video installation represents both a homecoming and a reinvention, a return to work he created in 1981, now reimagined through Cambodian dancers and contemporary lifestyles.
Against obsolescence
In 1981, Laub was emerging from Maniac Productions into what would become Remote Control Productions, right in the immediate aftermath of the post-punk, performance-art moment. The flower power kids had gotten haircuts. Reagan was about to take office. MTV was months away from launch.
“In terms of performance, it was a reaction to a form – theatre – that I considered obsolete, as opposed to other art forms at the time that were a lot more relevant – pop art, independent cinema and punk rock, which was a major influence on me,” he explains. “The conventionalism of theatre – and I make a clear distinction between conventionalism and classicism; I have the deepest respect for classicism – but theatre seemed particularly contrived, and in a way hypocritical, because it lacked spontaneity. I was reacting against that because it irritated me, and against myself and my own limitations.”
The original Snapping, created when Laub was in his late twenties, stripped theatre down to its essentials: people from all walks of life were portrayed, guided only by rhythm, breath and the snap of fingers. No elaborate sets. No narrative arc. No theatrical artifice.
“That’s why it was Maniac Productions, obsessive,” Laub says. “The repetition connected to minimal music at the time, like Steve Reich, but also to obsessive, neurotic patterns that were dysfunctional as opposed to the idealistic flower power period that preceded punk. My relationship to theatre at the time was practically post-mortem. I thought the thing was dead.”
When German professor Hans-Thies Lehmann later coined the term “post-dramatic theatre” to describe work like Laub’s, the director found himself repeatedly categorised.
“I’ve been called ‘post’ a lot of things and now my main concern is not to be ‘post-life’,” he says with the flat humour of someone who’s been post-everything except alive.
Remote Control
The company name that would define his career emerged from what Laub calls his “masochistic period in Sweden”. He had good contacts with museums and institutions, but no real audience. He became, he says, “frankly bored out of my mind”. Then cable television emerged, multiplying channels from three to dozens overnight.
“I was very into William Burroughs and the cut-up technique,” Laub explains. “Switching channels corresponded to that cut-up method. You could make a narration out of it. That’s where the ‘remote control’ concept came from.”
We bond over Burroughs for a minute – Laub lights up talking about The Wild Boys, which he reread recently.
“He was a visionary,” he says. “The guy was a genius.”
Another crucial influence was Miles Davis.
“Miles Davis defined cool – timeless cool. A great improviser who got away with it because he relied on a tight rhythmic structure that he could always fall back on. The first time I listened to it I thought, wow, that rhythmical section is really bulletproof; it’s so cool. And then he’s able to go all over the place because he’s always able to lean back into that. And I thought, this is something that I could apply to a completely different form.”
This became Laub’s method: Burroughs’ cut-up technique, Davis’ structured improvisation, minimal music’s repetition.
It’s clear he enjoys this mash-up of form and people. Different people from different places in Snapping, and dance and video – form – in Snap Dance.
“I use devices from other media and adapt them. When I’m commissioned to do a piece, for example at the Burgtheater – I only accept if I can mix the big stars with the guy who runs the canteen. My work is rhythmical. On stage, all you get is sound, image and rhythm. It can be slow, but it must have rhythm.”
“Even if I have a framework, a lot of the material is created during the rehearsals. which keeps it alive. There’s enormous input from my performers. I always tell them, ‘you can try anything you want’ – until about two weeks before we open the show,” he says in all seriousness. “Then, unless you come up with something else really genius, I’m going to take strict editorial control over the whole thing in order to get the right rhythm.”
“I audition obsessively to find people who will bring me the kind of material I want. So it’s really collaborative until the point I have that material – it gives me the illusion of control.”
It’s a system that allows for what seems like contradictions – the exhaustive rehearsal of his choreographies, contrasted with pieces like Snapping which are “based on the here and now”.
“On that score, it’s a temporary return to some of my early works. I’m also eager to go back to rehearsals,” he says, referring to his next show, a live performance called A Little Bit All Over the Place, anticipated to open in Phnom Penh in early June.
Better than theatre school
From the beginning, Laub preferred working with non-professionals, dancers and people outside traditional theatrical training.
“They act better because they didn’t go to theatre school,” he states. “Back then, theatre schools [in Europe] were disastrous. I could practically tell which one someone came from. I like using non-professionals; I like to contrast them with highly skilled performers.”
He traces this approach to the 1970s performance art movement. “In the seventies, theatre was bringing in new voices from other art forms: Robert Wilson from visual art, Pina Bausch from dance, Marina Abramović from performance art, the Wooster Group using video. All that was post-modern theatre. Dancers sometimes used text better than actors did. This change came with deconstructed theatre – non-linear narrative structures.”
But Laub resists being lumped into movements, his approach straightforward.
“I use minimalism in the sense of economy. Theatre spoke too much. I don’t like anything ornamental. I want the essential – not brutal realism, but oscillating between extreme realism and extreme artificiality, avoiding everything in between.
“People sometimes think I’m a formalist and I’m not. Form is very important, and I like the attempt at controlling it, but in live arts the performers as individuals are just as important, and individuals can be unpredictable. I just want to have a good time. I want the performers and the audience to have a good time, whatever that means. I don’t have any ridged theoretical or ideological kind of background” he insists.
“I don’t want to come across as anti-intellectual because I’m not. What I’m trying to say is that strictly conceptual art can sometimes become sterile as it often lacks an unpredictable human or personal element. I enjoy when someone suddenly bursts out laughing or expresses discomfort during their snapping. What is sometimes most interesting in a portrait is what escapes us.”
Coming to Cambodia
Laub’s relationship with Cambodia began in 2011, working extensively with Phare Ponleu Selpak in Battambang. When Covid shut down his European operations, he returned.
“I came back because I knew I could work here with dancers and artists I love,” he says. “Most of my choices are aesthetic – not just visual, but behavioural. I’m drawn to Cambodia for aesthetic, non-exotic reasons.”
During lockdown in Brussels, he rediscovered the only remnants of Snapping in the form of a faded trailer which is now part of the show.
“The first difference I noticed was speed – in the original, everyone was smoking, you could hear them coughing, they moved slower. Now people are faster. They don’t smoke, they take selfies. Attention spans are shorter. Just doing a remake would be boring.”
“In Cambodia, what struck me was the range of dance – from Apsara to hip-hop. That range motivated Snap Dance.”
The current installation, co-produced with IFC and Phare Ponleu Selpak, presents what the press release calls “a gallery of Cambodian portraits” – people from various social and professional backgrounds, as well as dancers from classical ballet, ballroom dancing and K-Pop, all moving without music. Viewers hear only footsteps, breathing, the rustle of costumes and the snapping of fingers that gives the piece its name.
Laub is characteristically modest about the work.
“It’s not that spectacular – it’s more like portraits. Madison Now in Phnom Penh was spectacular, full of energy. [This installation] is minimal. But I like it.” Later he adds, “Let’s not build expectations like you might for an intense stage performance. I’m not into hype and this is a simple piece, something with a little more distance. But yeah, I like it. Or I wouldn’t show it.”
Looking back at fifty years, Laub acknowledges he wasn’t consciously making portraits in 1981.
“I wasn’t aware that I was making portraits. I only started officially doing portraits in 2011. But when I saw that video, I thought, wow, that really consists of a portrait with a rhythmical structure. So it’s a sound piece as much as it is a portrait piece.”
Minimalism without ornament
When speaking of his aesthetic, he again comes back to his roots in performance art.
“I worked with Marina Abramović – one of the founders of body art and one of my closest friends. You’d go to galleries with nothing on the walls, bodies were used as canvas, and it was art. I came from that niche.”
But pure performance art, with its reliance on a single concept, didn’t satisfy him.
“I thought, ‘Why no music? Why no video?’ Why no talking? And later on, Why no dancing? Performance art relied on one concept pushed to the extreme, and luck – no rehearsal. I’m a control freak. I needed structure.”
Once he began combining elements – dance, video, text, music – he faced questions of dramaturgy. His solution was to approach each medium from “an essential, non-ornamental approach”.
He cites Samuel Beckett as an influence.
“I like Beckett writing in French because he stripped the language to its core. That’s what I mean by minimalism – economical, not academic.”
The resulting work has an almost meditative quality. There’s something strangely satisfying about watching and listening to both pieces – the rhythmic snapping, the changing video display, all creating an unintentional ASMR effect that draws viewers intimately into the exhibit.
Documentation and ethics
Laub’s work often incorporates real stories from real people. During his Portrait Series: Battambang project, something unexpected occurred.
“The ethical position becomes interesting when someone shows up unexpectedly with a story – like the man who walked kilometres to talk about his genocidal past. I wasn’t looking for that. For instance, in [the piece], there’s a scene where five women are crying because they were abused.”
Laub explains how this scene came about.
“A woman came in, started crying in a language I didn’t understand. We didn’t even have a good translator; all the good ones were in Phnom Penh at the Khmer Rouge trials. The first time, I just felt empathy. Then another woman came in, crying again. Until there were five. I put them together. We orchestrated that into a cacophonic scene. They worked on it together.”
“They kept coming back – ‘I can cry better than that.’ It was unbelievable.”
He hadn’t sought this out or planned for it. He wasn’t looking for psychological breakthroughs or collective healing. But watching these women work together, return voluntarily, take ownership of their own testimony – something happened that he hadn’t anticipated.
“I didn’t mean for it to be therapeutic,” he says, careful about the distinction. What he rejects is the artist-as-healer posture. “I dislike artists who claim to educate or heal. I get as much out of it as they do. I’m not pedagogical. I’m the opposite of a messianic artist. I am not a guru-like figure.”
But that doesn’t mean he didn’t recognise what was happening. The process became cathartic for the women – organically, instinctually, without him engineering it. His role was different: give them complete control, the ethical safeguard being involvement.
“When I work on portrait, I involve the subjects in the creative process. They can take out anything they dislike, even withdraw the entire piece. That way I don’t live with guilt of exploiting or hurting anyone, at least consciously. I show them the final result before it goes public. They have absolute veto rights.”
Three spaces, no fixed view
At IFC, the installation will move through three spaces – the exhibition gallery, the bistro and the cinema. As viewers enter the gallery, they’ll encounter the original 1981 trailer for Snapping playing on a small television. On both side walls, visible simultaneously, Snapping 2025 is projected – each side featuring twelve individuals of all ages and backgrounds, twenty-four in total.
Moving from the gallery through the bistro space, viewers will find a large screen showing full body images of dancers, one at a time, dancing and snapping. This functions as an introduction, a segway, to Snap Dance, the second component of the overall installation. Then in the cinema, the full Snap Dance will be projected on stage in a loop with solos in between.
Laub speaks about seeing Abramović’s show in Manchester, where simultaneous stages saw 800 people moving around, becoming part of the performance.
“My relationship to the audience is one of respect. Even in the seventies, I never meant to provoke anyone but myself. My goal is to entertain myself and others,” he says. “At the French Institute, I want flexibility. Viewers can sit, walk, stay two minutes or twenty. It’s more environmental; the audience becomes part of it.”
This is the punk sensibility in practice. It’s clear throughout our conversation that Laub is wary of pretension, of making his work sound more esoteric than it is.
Near the end of our chat, he returns to this concern: “I don’t want to scare people off. Sometimes people think, ‘this is really complicated stuff’, which really it isn’t. I noticed that in Battambang in 2011; I worked with people who couldn’t read or write, who understood my work a hell of a lot better than people who went ten years to university.”
He still believes real understanding comes from instinct, not theory. From recognising something true without needing anyone to explain what you’re supposed to think or feel. Next week at the French Institute – three rooms, no fixed position, stay two minutes or twenty. Nobody’s going to tell you which is right.
Michael Laub may have been called many things over the past four decades – post-dramatic, post-modern, minimalist, pioneer – but at his core, he remains what he was in 1981: a punk rocker who thought theatre was dead and keeps making it anyway.
Portrait Series – Snapping 2025 / Snap Dance will open at IFC in Phnom Penh with a reception on Wednesday, November 12 at 6pm, running through Saturday, November 15. Admission is free. For visiting hours and more information, visit www.ifcambodge.com.
