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The Kunstenfestivaldesarts Diary (1)Dateline: 14th May, 2008Brussels is perfect for a May festival. The sun is shining and on Sunday the centre of the city has been put entirely out of bounds for motor vehicles: it's heaven. The food in the AB Café is superb. But what about the shows? My festival got off to a powerful start at the Kaai Theater. The morning after, drinking excellent coffee on a sunny terrace on the Baksteen Kaai next to St Catherine's Church, I scribbled pages and pages of notes about this fascinating performance as the images from the previous evening tumbled into my imagination all over again. Kris Verdonck: End Kris Verdonck trained as a visual artist and this is his first performance on a main theatre stage. It has a powerful visual impact and is going to be controversial. The stage is covered with ash-like detritus which flutters continuously downwards like a reminder of the macabre fall out after Hiroshima or 9/11 or any major incendiary incident. It creates heaps of brown-black matter through which the characters stumble, sometimes fall, struggle onwards as they cross the stage in an endless repetition of futile actions. Upstage, onto a panorama is projected, in black and white, ominous scurrying clouds (or is it smoke billowing from some huge conflagration?). From time to time, against all Nature's reason, the image freezes for a few seconds, jerks before continuing again, as if the earth itself is shuddering in its course. "Against Nature's reason" would seem sum up the concept behind the performance. Five characters cross the stage in an endless repetitive struggle. One of them is dangling, a man in a smart suit suspended incomprehensibly high above the stage, utterly helpless, kicking, and swimming in air, fighting to move forward on his own volition, but trapped by some invisible force which impedes his progress. Another tumbles from the sky again and again, landing flat on his back, in a light blue suit, carrying a plastic bag. Optimistically, he jumps to his feet and marches off-stage, only to tumble downwards again shortly after. Sometimes, he lies there for a minute or so, as if questioning the use of going on with this endless and futile round, but every time, he springs to his feet courageously or foolishly and carries on and on and on. A young woman, smartly dressed, trapped on this gruesome carrousel, crosses the stage with a heavy body bag. She drags it, carries it like a child, humps it on her back, always determined, even when she pauses to rest, sitting on it to take a cigarette break, not to abandon her cargo. A man in a dark blue uniform drags a heavy weight, invisible offstage, attached to a harness. He struggles on and on, straining forward, increasingly fatigued, sweating, but incapable of stopping. This character has a dual reference, as we are told in the programme notes. He refers to the 1930s Soviet hero Alexei Stachanov, a miner who in one single day mined 120 kilos of coal instead of the prescribed 7 kilos for each worker. He was held up as a model to his compatriots in a campaign to increase productivity. In End, the Stachanov character is also reminiscent of Atlas, the Greek hero who carried the world on his shoulders. And in this sense, this character is also the culpable one who keeps the machinery turning over, so that everyone is trapped in the endlessly turning carrousel. The programme notes also tell us that the falling man refers to Ned Ludd, the weaver who, in 1776, smashed the first industrial loom, and whose followers, antagonistic to the Industrial Revolution, were called Luddites. So, the falling man courageously pits himself time and again against the power of the capitalist carrousel. The woman with the body bag is saddled with emotions and desires which are her burden and shackle her to the machine. Besides this, the most remarkable and unforgettable image is the smart young woman, fashionably clothed, neat blond wig, expensive high heels, who crosses the stage with movement so out of kilter that she is rendered a grotesque Barbie Doll, legs and arms all twisted into bizarre contortions. The dancer performing this part quite magnificently is suspended by the hips on a 40 kilo counterweight, so that she has to move very careful and slowly. In the post-show discussion, she explained how her character referred to the Musulmann, the name given to the walking dead in the Nazi concentration camps. Now, in the apocalypse, she is sick with toxic pollution and disease, but kept on the merry-go-round by her determination to keep up appearances. The characters are joined by Messenger in a glass vehicle which crosses that stage as he reads eye-witness accounts of strange unnatural phenomenon as we might hear them on talk-radio, from the absence of bees from their usual haunts in spring, through descriptions of the use of Napalm, a dismembered would-be migrant falling from the undercarriage of an airplane, people selling kidneys, fishing villages stranded in the desert, poisonous dust storms and on to increasingly horrendous tales of people witnessing the type of conditions and convulsive sickness reminiscent of the Black Death in the 14th century. The characters are each and every one alone in their struggle. The pass each other by, conscious only of their own plight; they are sad and solitary individuals, lacking in solidarity, divided by their own disempowerment. This is a profound and riveting piece of staging. I'm certain that these images, these characters, will stay with me for a long time to come. Bleak as the vision on stage might be, the humanity of the vision behind its conception is undeniable. And while this is a grim depiction of one potential future, the fact that Verdonck and his dramaturge Marianne van Kerkhoven, as well as his cast of actors and dancers, have found the courage to face this apocalyptic vision is perhaps a cause for optimism and for the hope that the seemingly inevitable might be avoided. Kris Verdonck is not entirely unknown in the UK. Earlier this year, his installation IN, in which a young woman in a very small maid's uniform was suspended in a tank of water, was presented at the Tramway, Glasgow, as part of the National Review of Live Art. He has a knack of challengingly audiences by positioning them in a disconcerting relationship to the material, questioning spectatorship itself. End is a development in terms of staging, but remains a challenge in many respects. End challenges the spectator to collaborate imaginatively, to compose his/her own narratives. As Marianne van Kerkhoven points out in the programme notes, theatre exists in time rather than merely space and therefore we expect development, a narrative. Verdonck's earlier installations imply a static situation, but here, in spite of the repetitious nature of the action, there is development as the characters become increasingly fatigued and distressed. And there is verbal text which serves to blend reality to the symbolism. This type of theatre is one in which the spectator is embraced as co-creator of meaning: the spectators bring his/her own life experiences and framework of references to bear in creating a fictional or real narratives. It is apposite that this should be so, for End implies that we should all bear responsibility for the narratives unfolding in our daily lives, it implies that we need to take responsibility for our own lives and our communities if we are to avert catastrophe. Please go and see this. It is a remarkable piece and important piece of work. Jackie Fletcher >> Next
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