De Pauw (Engels) - depot voor het VTi

josse de pauw
Storytellers as travelling companions; De Pauw as a
writer: Ward Comblez and Het Kind van de Smid
‘Words can be so beautiful … without their untidy context’,
thinks Ward Comblez, the first-person narrator in Josse De
Pauw’s monologue of the same name. In Ward Comblez. He do
the life in different voices, in 1989, and Het Kind van de Smid,
in 1990, language finally moves completely to the fore. In Ward
Comblez, Peter Van Kraaij, who trained as a film director, took
the parts of first reader, coach and director. The writing of Het
Kind van de Smid was a case of true co-authorship, which was to
lead to years of collaboration. Whereas movement and the materiality
of language (sounds, intonation, rhythm, etc.) played the
leading part in previous productions, from now on more attention
was paid to meanings, to the evocative effect of words and
to poetry. This attention to the text naturally had consequences
for the acting. Both Ward Comblez and Het Kind van de Smid
are very literary plays, or rather, they are easy to read on paper.
There are, moreover, constant shifts between traditional dramatic
categories such as plot development, building tension and psychological
character sketching. On stage they are given the necessary
theatrical power because characters in dialogue are
replaced by one or more narrators. What remains is the intimate
and direct confrontation between text, speaker and listener. In
this respect it is striking how tight the relationship between the
text and the acting is drawn: the words we hear are the account
of the process of storytelling. We follow the narrators in the construction
of their story, as if they thought up the events at the
moment we come into contact with them. Or, the action of the
plays is in the act of narration itself, in the language. ‘Autor-
Erzähler und Schauspieler-Erzähler sind identisch’, 8 wrote
Marianne Van Kerkhoven regarding the German translation of
Ward Comblez. Nor does the process of gestation end at the last
line of writing, but carries on in the performance – night after
night. Josse De Pauw, as the narrator, bridges the two functions.
De Pauw’s acting is almost a-theatrical, orally imploring and
with a plastic evocativeness. The emotional charge is stimulated
or punctured by traces of pathos. You catch an occasional
glimpse of it in his words, a gesture slightly too firmly sustained
in which the speaker at times loses himself.
24 / Kritisch Theater Lexicon - 14 e - August 2001
artistic development: de pauw’s way and weg
The physical act of narration brings the theatrical space to life.
The staging was also kept extremely frugal in both productions.
Nothing was to distract from the text, or rather, the narration. All
the objects on the stage are functional in one way or another: a
kitsch holiday snap and some women’s clothes in Ward Comblez;
an anvil, peat and old history prints in Het Kind van de Smid.
Apart from this, the empty set is filled with language by one or
more actors. Sometimes they come close to identifying with the
characters whose name they bear, and then the distance gradually
increases again. And in fact Josse De Pauw calls them ‘actors
who play narrators, and who perform a text’. 9 That which
Comblez does on his own by allowing himself to be swept along
by the stories and then suddenly putting himself above them, also
takes place in Het Kind van de Smid, but then between four narrators.
The strength of this play lies in the tension between being
swept along by the story and distancing oneself; in the collective
construction by the actors and the way they pick up on the signals
they send each other. In this connection, De Pauw and Van
Kraaij like to refer in interviews to the interplay with jazz musicians.
This fluid view of acting, in which the texts come to life in
a different way every night, naturally demands a suitable attitude
from the director Peter Van Kraaij. He gives a brief outline of his
working method in Theaterschrift 1991, no. 2: ‘I am very
reserved, and only gently make adjustments. It would be fatal to
direct every moment of a performance like this.’ 10
The rhythm of the narration is usually slow. The characters
look, in their words, for a way their story will evolve. By inserting
longer, descriptive passages, speech is slowed down, and then
suddenly spurts ahead with an eye to new storylines that may
captivate the audience and show the actor what he is involved in.
He tries, on the spur of the moment, to bring the strength of the
narration to life in a theatrical context.
Not many words are needed in either play to bring the images
into focus. The language has an independent nature: clusters of
letters are not there simply to communicate feelings and events,
but start a life of their own that evolves by way of repetition,
elliptical sentences, accumulation, imagery, sound similarities
and rhythm. This use of language is clearly apparent in the following
extract from Ward Comblez:
25 / Kritisch Theater Lexicon - 14 e - August 2001