Flemish Theatre Research Articles

Specificity of European Theatre Directing of the Flemish Wave: Metaphorical Images Luk Perceval

The purpose of the article is to reveal the peculiarities of the creative activity of one of the leading representatives of theatre directing of the "Flemish wave" Luk Perceval. Research methodology. The analytical method, the method of typological, art history, genre-stylistic, and figurative-stylistic analysis was used, thanks to which the author's approaches and the methodology of L. Perceval's direction were revealed and structured, as well as the method of theoretical generalisation. Scientific novelty. The creative activity of one of the leading directors of the European theatre at the end of the 20th century and the first two decades of the 21st century was studied. L. Perceval; the aesthetics of L. Perceval's theatrical direction are analysed through the prism of the concept of post-dramatic theatre; metaphorical images and their place in the visual text of the play are considered, using the example of the productions of "Othello" by W. Shakespeare and "Black-Yellow-Red Trilogy: Journey to the European Heart of Darkness" (alternative name "Belgium Sorrow") by S. Khin. Conclusions. Theatrical direction of L. Perceval, whose artistic thinking was formed in the atmosphere of Flemish theatre culture and reflects all its features, is characterised by an active search for exquisite symbolic forms of the embodiment of the highest unity of all living things. The director interprets modernity through the prism of the past, makes an attempt to highlight the deep contradictions of the modern socio-cultural space in the process of creating a system of creative reflections, the complex play of aesthetics of modern post-dramatic theatre and generalising various cultural layers and topics relevant to people of the 21st century in comprehensive metaphors. L. Perceval comprehends the problems of place and time, nature, life, freedom, independence, the complexities of life and natural contradictions, phenomena and tragedies that strike a person. The director expresses his own attitude, inner experiences and deep feelings with the help of metaphorical symbols that make up the essence of his creative manner. A feature of L. Perceval's directorial vocabulary is the search for metaphorical ways of stage expression of the complex psychological content of productions, in the process of researching the main contradictions of the human personality, which enhance the plasticity of the updated minimalist stage space of the performance. Keywords: Luk Perceval, European theatre direction, "Flemish wave", post-dramatic theatre, metaphorical images.

Theatre Curation and Institutional Dramaturgy: Post-Representational Transformations in Flemish Theatre

Theatre Curation and Institutional Dramaturgy: Post-Representational Transformations in Flemish Theatre

“See the Revolution of the Times”: Ivo van Hove’s Materialist Shakespeare Cycles

ABSTRACTThis review essay examines Flemish theatre director Ivo van Hove’s history cycles, Roman Tragedies (Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra) and Kings of War (Henry V, Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and 3 and Richard III), as examples of ways contemporary directors can utilise Shakespeare to present a cultural materialist vision of today’s late capitalist society. The essay provides an overview of van Hove’s theatrical work, a brief trajectory of Shakespeare history cycles, and argues that van Hove’s performative conflation of theatrical audiences with the broader public masses highlights the ways in which apparent public participation in the state is often illusory. Through productions such as these, van Hove reveals himself as an heir to Bertolt Brecht and Jan Kott, who read Shakespeare’s history plays as meditations on the cyclical nature of authoritarian power structures.

Theatre of War: Commemorating World War I in Belgium

Every town and village throughout Flanders is commemorating the gruesome events of 1914–1918 with a range of activities. Some of these propose intelligent and thoroughly researched perspectives on WWI, while others are just simple tourist entertainments. Flemish theatre artists enthusiastically contribute to this frenzy, although some choose to deconstruct the folkloric myths to comment on the economics of the commemoration industry or on present-day atrocities.

Research note: the other side of the stage, revealing compositional differences in Flemish amateur theatre audiences

This research note aims to address the lack of research focused on the audiences of amateur theatre and examines how audiences of artistic- (i.e. participating in festivals with high artistic requirements) and social- (i.e. not participating in those festivals with high artistic requirements) oriented amateur theatre groups differ. This is achieved by performing a quantitative study of eight amateur theatre audiences in Flanders (Belgium). Analyses of 538 standardised questionnaires derived from on-site data collection, show that the audiences of artistic amateur groups significantly differ from the audiences of social-oriented amateur theatre groups. Amateur theatre groups with an explicitly artistic orientation have a significantly younger audience that had participated in other cultural events over the previous six months. They are also often recruited by word of mouth. By contrast, social amateur theatre groups attract a significantly older audience, including those who live in the vicinity.

Beginners On Stage: Arendt, Natality and the Appearance of Children in Contemporary Performance

This paper examines the complex questions that arise around the appearance of children in contemporary performance. Drawing on performances by Nottingham-based theatre company Zoo Indigo and by Tim Etchells and the Flemish theatre company Victoria, I consider the extent to which Hannah Arendt's theorization of natality as ‘the new beginning inherent in birth’ that gives rise to the political potential to ‘begin something anew’ can help us to understand the ethico-political dimensions of children's appearance as natal, biological and relational beings in contemporary performance. In particular, I draw on feminist interpretations of Arendt's work to articulate the significance of the embodied aspects and ethical quality of children's relation to adult spectators and performers. I argue that these performances prompt a rethinking of the child's potential to generate political intervention, which moves beyond Arendt's gendered account of political agency in a public sphere from which children are excluded.

The Politics of Scenography: Disrupting the stage

In 2009 Flemish theatre maker Thomas Bellinck got involved in the protest of a group of paperless immigrants in Brussels. What started as an unnoticed hunger strike in an underground parking, with the help of Bellinck transformed in a public protest on a historical meaningful square in the city centre: nine hunger, with no legal status, conducted by Bellinck sang the ‘Brabançonne’, the Belgian national hymn. Not much later, and to almost everybody's surprise, the protest action was selected for the 2009 edition of the Flemish Theatre Festival. Instead of putting the protest on stage, re-enacting it, at the opening's night of the festival Bellinck delivered a text in Brussels’ Kaaitheater, somewhere between a political speech and a theatrical monologue raising pressing questions about the relation between art and activism.

Edward II (review)

Reviewed by: Edward II Johan Callens Edward II. By Christopher Marlowe. Directed by Ivo van Hove. Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin. 20–21 January 2012. When assuming the artistic directorship of Toneelgroep Amsterdam in 2000–2001, Ivo van Hove took a gamble by mounting Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris, a propagandistic piece that has survived in a corrupt memorial reconstruction and that has been underrepresented in the repertoire. That production featured a daring set by Jan Versweyveld, van Hove’s partner and collaborator since their early days on the margins of 1980s Flemish theatre, and costumes by gay fashion designer Walter Van Beirendonck. In this respect, it was as radical an artistic statement as the “filmic” production of Edward II (1924) with which the young and aspiring Brecht claimed his place on Berlin’s stage. As Martin Esslin and Jan Knopf have argued, Brecht’s Marlowe adaptation broached not only the subject of homosexuality but revived the question of history’s theatrical representation, which was either silenced in the wake of World War I disillusionment or spectacularized in epic UFA pictures like Lubitsch’s Madame Dubarry (1919) and Anna Boleyn (1920). Almost a century later, the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz—the same company that revived van Hove’s acclaimed production of The Misanthrope for the New York Theatre Workshop (2007)—invited him to stage Marlowe’s Edward II. Outdoing Brecht yet using Marlowe’s original like both Claus Peymann (1998) and Frank Castorf (1999) before him, van Hove enhanced the homosexual theme and recontextualized the play within the problematic German heritage of World War II. Telescoping events that took place years apart, Marlowe’s history play personalizes the early fourteenth-century struggle between the English Crown and the nobility through Edward’s love for the low-born Gaveston. In Germany, Edward II reentered the repertoire with Brecht’s adaptation, which was dependent on Lion Feuchtwanger’s help and Walter von Heymel’s 1912 translation, which van Hove also used. If Brecht was attracted to the play’s critique of abusive authorities, Derek Jarman, in the AIDS-dominated climate of the 1990s, took an interest in the play’s gay theme and its usefulness for his activist agenda. Van Hove also foregrounded these political issues, shifting the setting to the interior of a contemporary prison, replete with camera surveillance, factionalism, and sexual violence, and using a self-conscious, intermedial mise en scène to invoke the fraught memory of Germany’s military past—still repressed by the elder generation, already forgotten by the younger. The result was a heavily edited text, structured and framed by fifteen intertitles that invoked Brecht’s epic theatre and Piscator’s agit-prop, even if the ideological side of van Hove’s earlier Marlowe production as a piece of religious propaganda may have proven a liability. For van Hove, Gaveston’s early intention of pleasing the art-loving king with boys reenacting Actaeon as he spies on a naked Diana—a speech delivered without visual support to give the language its full due—turned the entire deposition drama into an inset of sorts, “The Dream of Edward II,” as announced in the first program-matic intertitle. The brevity of the first few scenes, marked by the titles’ brusque and noisy intrusion, imposed a dynamic that instantly drew the viewers into the drama. Subsequently, the pace varied, following the demands of the action, ever summarized in single catchwords (Politik [politics], Liebe [love], Widerstand [resistance], Komplott [conspiracy], Kalkül [calculation], Homosexualität [homosexuality], and [End Page 601] so on). All intertitles were briefly projected onto a screen straddling two rows of four cells separated by an elevated security desk, a panoptic watchtower against a back wall of galvanized metal plates. Click for larger view View full resolution Urs Jucker (Leicester) in Edward II. (Photo: Jan Versweyveld.) This omnipresent camera surveillance, deployed in screen montages (by Tal Yarden), linked inmates separated by the wide stage but also exposed their intrigues, secret thoughts, and yearnings. Occasionally, the perspective of the prison interiors was distorted or the otherwise black-and-white images morphed into colors, thereby measuring the subjectivity of certain speeches and the drama’s emotional intensity. Van...

Kris Verdonck's Garden Installation EXOTE: Ecozoic wanderlust at the edge of Eden

Thomas Barry, author of The Dream of the Earths, suggests that our civilization is moving into an ecozoic, rather than an ecological era. While ecology merely refers to an understanding of our life systems and their integral relations, the term ecozoic (zoic bering derived from the Greek zoe meaning life) also conveys the feeling of an immediate, biological reality. This paper puts EXOTE (2011), the latest creation of Flemish theatre maker and visual artist Kris Verdonck, within the context of ecozoic art. EXOTE is an indoor garden that has been planted on the first floor of the Z33 House for Contemporary Art in Hasselt. It houses species that have been defined by the European Union as ‘invasive alien species’; they thrive outside their natural distribution area, threaten biological diversity and hence have a devastating impact on ecology. Verdonck selected a number of these species and brought them together in one big luminous garden. The garden of Eden that turns ‘sick’ in the end – putting together invasive species in a confined space is an experiment of biological wars and battles of survival – is a metaphor for sick contemporary humanity. Intense worldwide trade has introduced several species into new habitats, allowing them to invade the local fauna. In this sense, this interactive installation and the performative walking of its visitors allude to the malaise of overproduction and consumption. Verdonck's garden is in that sense a hortus contemplationis: a garden that triggers a reflexive response to utilitarianism and resource exploitation, communicating an ecological consciousness, by means of conveying an immediate, biological reality.

Mapping a Landscape of Texts

What does ‘mapping’ mean when applied to a large corpus of artistic documents one wishes to examine? How can the methodologies of ‘distant reading’ (Franco Moretti) be applied to contemporary performative writing? In order to translate a corpus of texts into a spatial map, this paper proposes to use tools from computational linguistics and information visualization. For the research project ‘Belgium is Happening’, a large corpus of performative writings from Flemish and Dutch post-war theatre was digitized. These were processed computationally in order to determine their intertextual distances. Next, the set of all document nodes and their intertextual distances was visualized as a series of network graphs. The resulting graphs clearly distinguish authorship clusters. They make clear which authors wrote in a closely related style, and help to identify specific subgenres of experimental writing and style. Such a map literally provides a bird's eye view of the different experimental texts, and it also makes it possible to question existing groupings in literary history using the results of the automatic clustering approach.

Culture Clash: Some Notes on Flemish Theatre and its Critical Reception in New York City

The history of theatrical exchange between Belgium and the United States, and more notably between Flanders and America's cultural capital, New York City, dates back to Maurice Maeterlinck, who was...

Something is Rotten on the Stage of Flanders: Postdramatic Shakespeare in Contemporary Flemish Theatre

The diverse afterlives of Shakespeare's tragedies often disclose particular artistic visions within a changing theatre landscape. This article explores how contemporary Flemish adaptations reflect a changing understanding of the 'tragic' that signals the emergence of a postdramatic theatre aesthetic. In particular, productions by Jan Decorte, whose Hamlet shocked the Brussels audience in 1978, Jan Lauwers' Shakespeare-cycle, created with his Needcompany in the 1990s, and Peter Verhelst's two poetic adaptations of Romeo and Juliet (1998 and 1999) will be discussed. I shall argue that in these wayward versions, Shakespeare's text is treated as Fremdkorper - as an impure, foreign body - in order to articulate a postdramatic vision of the vanity of action, of the unrepresentable notions of violence and death, and of the performative power of poetic language. The tragic heroes are no longer treated as traditional elevated characters where catharsis develops from a mimesis of pain, from an empathic identification with the hero. Here, instead, as Hans-Thies Lehmann observed in Postdramatic Theatre, borrowing a term from Adorno, a 'mimesis to pain' haunts the contemporary Flemish stage: we witness a 'transition from represented pain to pain experienced in representation' (p. 166, original emphasis [Routledge, 2006]).

The “theater inside-out” and other spaces.

Over the last years, Kahle Acoustics has had the opportunity to collaborate on several projects for innovative theatrical spaces. For The Curve in Leicester, UK, from the start of the design process the brief called for what was labeled the “theater inside-out,” a theater that would be visible from the street and breaks with the classical boundaries between front of house and back of house spaces. In the final design, the central stage opens onto both a 750-seat auditorium on one side and a 350-seat Black Box theater on the other side. In addition, the side walls of the stage house are vertically moving acoustic shutters, so that the stage can be opened to the glass-clad foyer surrounding the theaters. Other spaces include the more classical Royal Flemish Theatre (KVS) in Brussels and the Thâtre de l’Archipel in Perpignan, a theater with two configurations and variable seat count from 600 to 1100, and the highly flexible space La Commanderie in Dole, France, with variable seat count from 592 to 2700, and usage ranging from intimate theater to opera, classical concerts, as well as professional sports events and standing audience rock concerts.

Art world on stage: Analyzing the social logic of literary realities and aesthetic dispositions in the contemporary Flemish theatre world

In Art Worlds (1982), Howard Becker presents a sociological account of how the production of art is a collective enterprise involving various people occupying different roles and positions. This article investigates to what extent various members of the contemporary theatre world in Flanders (Belgium) differ in their aesthetic dispositions and their familiarity with and preference for a wide range of playwrights, providing insight into the literary reality of these dramatists. Using a unique dataset that combines a sizeable sample of audience members with a random sample of drama teachers, students, directors, actors, and stagecraft and technical crew active both in the professional and the amateur field, we applied multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) to explore what latent dimensions the Flemish theatre world is structured along. We found that three axes constitute the field: a knowledge axis, an experiment axis, and a folk axis. The ‘Beckerian’ positions are primarily structured along taste oppositions that can be traced to ‘Bourdieusian’ investments in types of cultural capital through educational level and tracking.

Narrative and Rhetoric in Social Work Education

This article starts from the narrative turn in the humanities and the social sciences in general and social work in particular to explore the study of fictional narratives in social work education. Rhetoric is presented as an important perspective for social work by focusing on the work of the rhetorician and literary critic Kenneth Burke (1897–1993), specifically on his theory of dramatism. The dramatistic pentad is introduced as an analytical tool to study fictional narratives. In a case study, a play and a film by a Dutch–Flemish theatre collective are jointly analysed by students from the Master of Social Work and Welfare Studies programme at a Flemish university. This rhetorical perspective gives social work students the opportunity not only to study fictional narratives, but also to reflect upon their own practice.

The Double Recursiveness of Postmodern Dance

E rase-E(X) is an intriguing dance piece which officially originated in a workshop organized during the 2004 Festivals of Montpellier Danse and Avignon. For the occasion, Joji Inc., the Brussels-based dance company led by Johanne Saunier and Jim Clayburgh, asked the Wooster Group to rework a choreographic phrase from Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. The next year a second movement was added in which De Keersmaeker reappropriated her material. This artistic dialogue then formed the basis for a third movement in which Isabella Soupart directed Saunier, joined now by a male dancer, Charles Francois. The piece was showcased at the Royal Flemish Theatre in Brussels on September 16, 2006, where I saw it, but at the time of writing three more installments were already in the making, a suivre, as the sign ending the third part indicated.

Programmatic choices and the demand for theatre: the case of Flemish theatres

Theatre experts generally agree that the Flemish theatre has flourished artistically over the period 1980–2000. Attendance, on the other hand, has declined significantly. Following Lancaster’s characteristics approach, we identify several output characteristics of individual theatre productions. Using a panel of 59 Flemish theatres, we examine the impact on demand of both these output characteristics and of traditional determinants such as own price, income and the price of substitutes. Differences in the relevant geographical market for touring and non-touring theatres are considered. We find that the nature of the artistic output affects demand. Theatregoers prefer large productions (in terms of cast size), plays by Dutch-speaking playwrights and revivals of old productions. Own price and consumer income have the expected negative and positive effects on attendance. Observed trends toward a decreasing proportion of new plays, an increasing presence of plays by Dutch-speaking playwrights, and increasing consumer income had a stimulating effect on attendance. These trends have been offset, however, by trends toward smaller cast sizes and higher ticket prices as well as by unobserved factors captured by time dummies. The net result has been a considerable drop in attendance.

Jan Fabre: Belgian Theatre Magician

The critics called out: Beware of charlatans, magicians, and gurus in the theatres! Beware of the critics, came the resounding echo, the critics who left the theatre of the Flemish artist and director Jan Fabre in protest and spilled their venomous ink in the press. But the opinions expressed were sharply divided. More than a few enthusiasts, driven by curiosity, remained in the theatre and intoned his praises. The radical disapproval of some was matched by the admiration of others, who would soon come to believe that, in the midst of short-lived theatre fads, Jan Fabre, born in 1958 in Antwerp, would belong among the leading directors in European theatre. That was 1984. The theatre that was being discussed seemed more brutal and persevering than ever before--a theatre that was fundamentally not theatre, worse yet, was a betrayal of theatre itself. This trumpet blast heralded the beginning of not only Fabre's international career, but also the international reputation of the new Flemish theatre. The role of commanding Flemish theatre avantgardist fell to Fabre, but at the same time choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker as well as director Jan Lauwers and his teacher, director Jan Decorte, were renovating northern Belgian stagecraft, moving away from the conventions of European civic theatre. At the Venice Biennale in June 1984, the audience in Teatro Carlo Goldoni saw for the first time Fabre's now legendary production of The Power of Theatrical Madness (De macht der theaterlijke dwaasheden). A piece--if one could call it that-in which everything was done wrong that could possibly be done wrong in the theatre. The spectators were allowed to come and go as they pleased. Out in the foyer, the bar remained open for four hours. Inside, a slender, blond young woman who had been bumped from the stage into the orchestra pit, tried for 20 minutes to climb back onto the stage. Whenever the increasingly enraged, crying, screaming, and cursing Els Deceukelier seemed about to succeed, actor Paul Verwoort would shove her off again, insultingly screaming a password at her: eighteen hundred seventysix (1876). It was no game, rather it seemed mercilessly, deadly serious. A loudly ranting horde of barefoot men and women ran in place. The sweat of these trained endurance runners sprayed into the front rows, and their panting filled the theatre with the level of intensity one might expect in a sports sta-

Autonome theaterkritiek?

The French cultural sociologist Bourdieu has developed his personal view on the role of social mechanisms within the artistic field. With his theoretical insights in mind, the author of this article has explored the Flemish theatre circuit The author provides us with an analysis of this field, with the particular focus upon the role (function) of the theatre critic. The writing on theatre seems to be connected with the position and the status of the reviewer and the commented company. Since 1975, the Flemish theatre reviewer has been developing a specific struggle for 0 legitimate view on theatre. Due to his own contribution, this struggle has resulted in the issue of a new 'stage decree'. This new line of policy instigated a parallelism between the artistic and political field in Flanders.

Bert Andre: Mainstay of the Flemish Theatre

Bert Andre: Mainstay of the Flemish Theatre