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The Avignon Festival 2006 - A Personal Encounter (Part III)Reviews (3)Jacqueline Fletcher visits the 60th Avignon FestivalDateline: 6th August, 2006Rouge Décanté Jerone Brouwers was born into a family in a similar situation to the characters in Gens de Séoul. His family were part of the Dutch colonial presence in Indonesia. However, during World War II, while still a small child, the Japanese invaded and he was interned with his mother and grandmother in a concentration camp. There are still many people in The Netherlands who spent some years in a Japanese concentration camp and were, like Brouwers, deeply affected by the experience. The traumas experienced by Brouwers throughout his life formed the basis for the novel Bezonken Rood (Rouge Décanté). One of The Netherlands best known and most respected writers of fiction, essays and literary criticism, Brouwers's work is never simply a realist narrative. He blends reflection and observation with a poetic use of language. His characters are always anguished, melancholic or obsessed with corporeality and mortality. They are always concerned with the difficulty of human, especially sexual interactions, and the obsessional drive to write. Brouwers regards his oevre as a 'single grand ensemble of…autobiographical anecdotes…that are never entirely distinct from the life of the author himself'. (1) This piece is an adaptation into monologue form which makes some cuts in the original text but otherwise uses Brouwers's own words. It has been translated into French for the Festival. According to Cassiers, the piece is an almost Proustian universe, because the character lives ineluctably with his past, so that he can't have a normal life in the present. His relationship with women is almost impossible; his relationship with his mother has been destroyed. The jigsaw is put together in pieces. For an hour and a half we live with this man's obsessions as slowly this history is revealed, bit by bit, and like a 'who-dun-it' we have to sift through the occurrences, reassemble the facts, try to understand his pain through the fragments of his speech. Dirk Roofthooft plays this tortured character superbly. He has the audience enrapt in the palm of his hand; one can't do anything but give oneself over to him as if, like the Ancient Mariner, he has something special that forces his audience to listen to his story, squirm and feel the horror and the suffering. The set consists of a series of small and large screens. There is series of huge slats like giant Venetian blinds at the back which when not in use are bathed in different coloured lights and flap gently in the wind. At the side a small, semi-transparent, window-like screen of glass slats on a stand, through which one can see Roofthooft's blurred presence while simultaneously watching a fuzzy live image projected and then the lower half of his body visible between the iron posts of the frame: three broken up views of a broken up man. It is one of the most remarkably intense and fascinating uses of live video in performance that I've ever seen. According to Cassiers, one mustn't be precious about the use of multimedia in live performance: video is a tool just like lighting. In Rouge Décanté, everything projected is filmed live by seven cameras placed around the stage. But there are no cameramen; there is no-one between the character and the spectator. It is the actor who chooses which camera he wants to use and a stage manager then links the cameras with the screens. Cassiers likens this effect to improvised jazz: there is a basic pre-established structure with permanent variations. This serves to enhance the actor's performance:
This use of video is utterly engrossing, blended as it is with different colours of lighting. Peter Massotten of the Filmfabriek (Film Factory) has designed the set, video and lighting and the entire stage picture is organically a part of the overall expression of the actor, even the fragmentation and the distortions are part of his personality. One can watch one image while being aware of others and it seems as if something genuinely visceral is taking place, especially as all of the projected images are distorted in one way or another. The tearful figure on the stage can seem life a tiny, naïve infant, while the screen shows us something grotesque and gargantuan. The pain on his face can be magnified to fill the stage as it fills his consciousness, making it difficult for the spectator to look away or avoid. This combination of distortions and fragmentations, innocence and gross corporeality is effective because it tells us something about ourselves. The production is usually performed in a theatre building, but here in the open air in the Cloître des Celestines, with the stone arches in the background, the noise of the wind in the trees and even the sections of the screen being blown about by the wind, there was something special happening. It was as if the environment and the elements worked with the body of the actor rendered threatening and vulnerable by the video. In this piece the body of the character is important: it was the body that was imprisoned, and it is in this body that the mind is imprisoned. It is Artaud's theatre of cruelty, the tortured mind in a tortured body revealed through the theatre and its double. One can be fascinated by this man, disgusted by him, repelled because what is human in him is human in us, and one can feel sympathy, horror, but one can't evade him. Cassiers has already had quite an illustrious career as artistic director of the RoTheatre in Rotterdam and has worked for the Toneelschuur in Haarlem and the Kaaitheater Brussels. Together with Jan Lauwers, Ivo van Hove, Wim VandeKeybuis, Anne-Theresa de Keersmaeker and Jan Fabre, he is one of that small group of Flemish directors/choreographers who over the last fifteen to twenty years have been slowly working away to make what is, to my mind, and to many others, the most exciting theatre in Europe at the moment. Because their work is interdisciplinary, and because they can work in French, Dutch and English, they have gathered quite a large following and a huge body of critical acclaim while they remain unknown in the UK. 1. Programme notes. >> Next page
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