ARCHIVES 2014 / Huis

By combining two of Michel de Ghelderode's short plays into a single show, Josse de Pauw attempts a reflection, full of humour and of Belgian “absurdism,” on death. A death that has yet to come, as in The Strange Rider, or that has already struck, as in The Women at the Tomb. Moving from a room in a hospice, where six old men are waiting for a watchman to tell them what he sees, to the house of Marie, Jesus's mother, where are gathered, the day after the crucifixion, the women who followed Jesus, Josse de Pauw aims to make us hear the words of Michel de Ghelderode, to whom he feels closely connected. Together with musician and composer Jan Kuijken, he continues his exploration of a musical theatre in which words and notes meld and merge. Their goal is for the music to offer “an almost physical experience to the public.” Whether they use symphonic music to accompany the old men waiting for death or a women's choir in Marie's house, they want the music to always be a counterpoint to Ghelderode's words, to create a sort of dialogue. There's something of the farce, of the burlesque, of the grotesque even, in Ghelderode's plays, so closely tied to Flemish culture. And there's something of the tragedy, too, when his characters hold a mirror to us, reflecting our anxieties when faced with the realities of ageing and death, and our relative indifference to the tragedies that surround us.

An actor for the theatre and the cinema, a short story writer and a playwright, a director, a dramatist, a librettist, and a dramaturge, Josse de Pauw is all that and more. In 1977 he co-founded, along with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Jan Lauwers, the Radeis collective, which would be at the forefront of a revolution in the world of Flemish theatre by leaving behind the dark and confined spaces of theatre houses to play in public spaces and take part in people's daily lives. Their performances often substitute bodies and gestures for words, their elaborate slowness standing in contrast to the never-ending movement of the city. Starting in 1984, he began a series of collaborations (such as Schaamte, which would later become the Kaaitheater) and of solo works. He tirelessly moved from one stage to the next, refusing to ever “redo” something he'd done before, and wishing his different shows to remain forever in a sort of unfinished state. After adapting and playing in Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, directed by Guy Cassiers, he turned to a series of interviews given by Hugo Claus to create The Claus Version. In the past few years he's worked primarily on what he calls “dramatic concerts,” such as The Soul of Termites and The Hanged, two LOD productions, in which music plays a central role as a partner to the text and the actors' performances.

A cellist and piano player by training, Jan Kuijken likes collaborating with other artists. After working with the band Louise Avenue, he turned to composing and began working with choreographers, before introducing his own projects as an artist associated with LOD, a production company based in Ghent specialising in musical shows. He first partnered with Josse de Pauw in 2004 to create a first “dramatic concert,” The Soul of Termites, which took the form of a scientific conference that jumped from the lives of termites to the Rwanda massacres. In 2011, they created another concert, The Hanged, in which actors and singers, hanging above an orchestra, sing in Latin and recite texts in Flemish to pay homage to those who paid for their thirst for knowledge with their lives.

Born to a Flemish family, Michel de Ghelderode grew up with an authoritarian father and a superstitious mother. All his schooling was done in French and it is in that language that in 1918, aged only twenty, he wrote his first play. He developed a baroque form of theatre, in which Flemish influences stood alongside those inherited from Antonin Artaud. He wrote more than fifty plays, a testament to his commitment to a new theatre in which puppets and the concept of masquerade play a central part.

Jean-François Perrier, April 2014