De Pauw (Engels) - depot voor het VTi

josse de pauw
Radeis performed in twenty-four countries (at Caracas, Avignon,
Los Angeles, etc.) until they decided to stop in 1984. The members
wanted, in this way, to avoid lapsing into routine. This success
story was brought to an end after the festival in Los Angeles.
Despite the fact that Radeis had developed into a major Belgian
export product, appearing on many international stages, the
company never received any direct subsidy. As an experimental
group, they did not fit into the norms of the 1975 theatre act,
since they only had one professional actor. In May 1978 Hugo
De Greef set up Schaamte together with Radeis, and other artists
and groups immediately joined them. This working structure was
in the first place intended to offer a basis (financial, among other
things) onto which performing artists could fall back or from
where they could take off in their artistic projects. We shall
return to Schaamte’s work more extensively later.
Several main elements can be pointed out with regard to Radeis’
influence on De Pauw’s later work and especially on his acting:
to start with, there was the enormous desire for freedom that led
to the Radeis actors working on stage. They acted free of the prevailing
theatre tradition, boundaries between disciplines and
even the language barrier. Of all the players, only De Pauw had
had professional training for the theatre.
The non-hierarchical form of working was also crucial; the
mutually reinforcing desires of four people from which Radeis’
theatre was born. They were attuned to each other like jazz musicians.
For De Pauw, collaboration on the basis of a healthy dose
of ‘complicité’ and playfulness remained an important prerequisite
for making plays in his later career. The conversation with
several voices but no clearly apparent central focus also turned
up again later as the non-hierarchical structure of his performances
and writings.
For Radeis, the relationship with the audience took absolute priority:
the audience was an essential protagonist. Although the
succession of gags and frivolous and absurd situations had a
humorous effect, the player’s main intention was to make the
spectator reflect on the reason for this jollity. This was done,
among other ways, by playing with the factor of time. By sophisticated
timing (slow, often repetitive), low-key humour and subtle
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artistic development: de pauw’s way and weg
irony they built up the tension in the audience. Just as Josse De
Pauw was to do in his later plays, they were guarded in unfolding
a particular item. The employment of a double consciousness
(person/character) among the actors and audience was ahead of
innovations in acting that came in the course of the eighties.
This matter of making the rhythm tangible so as to deepen the
spectator’s vision led to another aspect: the sensory. The Radeis
actors juggled and talked to real objects, just as De Pauw was to
do later with the props that had been transformed into language
in the world of his imagination. Radeis’ acting was born out of
the same quest for authenticity which is constantly present in De
Pauw’s work. The experience of the authentic arises from the
actor’s honesty to the spectator, whom he does not underestimate,
and whereby, most importantly, he does not allow himself
to be tied down by ill-considered words (or a superfluous set).
When jazz combines with words: Usurpation
Josse De Pauw only allowed the spoken word to seep very gradually
into his work as an independent play-maker. After eight
years of making wordless plays with Radeis, the epic narrator
who appeared in Ward Comblez or the chattering actor in De
Meid Slaan needed a little leg up. This arrived in 1985 in the
shape of the Schaamte production Usurpation. Passages he had
written himself were cautiously, almost reluctantly, introduced as
a consequence of the actor’s great need to speak. Initially, De
Pauw let music hold his hand. Just as in Weg, made twelve years
later, the speech and rhythm were largely determined by the
interaction with two musicians who shared the stage with him.
It was entirely fitting for De Pauw’s way of doing things that
his musical blood-brother Peter Vermeersch already made his
appearance in Usurpation as a composer and musician.
Vermeersch on saxophone and Danny Van Hoeck on percussion
do not so much follow the actors as guide the whole performance,
marking the scene changes and occasionally drowning
the sparsely spoken words. A great many silences fall between
the archetypical man (De Pauw) and woman (Mieke Verdin), but
this silence is made eloquent by the hard jazz surrounding it. The
compositions form a third voice that shifts alternately between
21 / Kritisch Theater Lexicon - 14 e - August 2001