De Pauw (Engels) - depot voor het VTi

josse de pauw
Smith). With a minimum of acting movement, the actors tell us
about the figures in the story or speak through them. Sometimes
they come close to a genuine character, and then shortly afterwards
leave it again. The actors remain above all themselves;
they are speaking bodies who build up the story together and
alternately allow each other to speak. In so doing, the commentator
Willy Thomas uses a microphone and a portable loudspeaker,
while dressing up in carnival hats, false spectacles,
beards and ears. He narrates in an ironic and sarcastic manner;
this tone keeps the deeply serious theme in balance while strangling
any possibility of pamphleteering but at the same time
emphasises the seriousness of the findings. The other actors narrate
in a deliberate, subtle and intimate manner.
The inspiration for the text came both from Van Kraaij’s study
of American history and De Pauw’s reading of Robert Hughes’
The Fatal Shore. From this they distilled the story of an Irish
smith who emigrated to America in the early 19 th century to enter
the service of the Corps of Discovery that President Jefferson had
commissioned to chart the unexplored Missouri river. There he
witnesses an Indian woman (Sacajaweja) giving birth to the child
of a white Canadian. After the death of the Canadian, the Smith
also fathers a child by her. The first-born is called Pomp, the second
just Kind [Child]. Through the life of these two half-brothers
we experience the history of the exploration of north-west
America and the contact with Indian tribes, the famine in Ireland
and the penal colony in Australia.
The research work that accompanied this writing process is
clear to see in the quotation of historic details and the references
to historical events that are scattered throughout the play.
Although the writing is in the same visual, poetic language as
Ward Comblez, this is a more complex play with broader intentions.
The various voices which, in the monologue, centred on
the narrator, are in Het Kind van de Smid divided into different
figures. In this play, the different voices have become a more
clearly structuring element. History also becomes a separate
voice, which is both informative and creates and epic setting.
Extracts from authentic documents are read out to the audience:
speeches by Indian chiefs, extracts from logbooks, a quotation
from President Thomas Jefferson, etc. become part of the writing,
in their original form. Actual dates and geographic locations
are constantly being given, which makes the real historic frame-
30 / Kritisch Theater Lexicon - 14 e - August 2001
artistic development: de pauw’s way and weg
work a prominent presence. The references in the following passage,
for instance, describing the death of the Indian woman
Sacajaweja (the Smith’s wife and mother of the Child), absorb it
into the epic progress of time, as a detail in the mass white exploration
of North America.
The Smith
Soshone camp, autumn 1812
The Indian woman is ill. The medicine man is busy day and
night. I do not sleep.
Soshone camp, autumn 1812
That old fellow with his rattles is starting to get on my nerves.
This is a white illness.
The Child
It was autumn 1812. We took the Indian woman to Fort
Manuel. The white doctor there would cure her. …
The Smith
Fort Manuel, autumn 1812
Her nails in my arm.
The Child
20 th September, 7 o’clock in the evening, the Indian woman,
our mother, died.
Set against this immense background, the story of these fictional
characters assumes a form. The three characters are narrators:
they have hardly any dialogue with each other but their narrations
build up the story piece by piece. Both Pomp and the Child
tell about themselves in the first person and about each other in
the third person , but they rarely use the dialogue we-form. Just
as in Ward Comblez, the epic preterite is a form of expression in
storytelling. Descriptions of nature and human movements
throughout the play slow it down somewhat. Erwin Jans called
this ‘the slow rhythm of observation’ 13 . The images evoked are
highly distilled. The environment is sketched using few but carefully
chosen words. This distances us from what is being told,
and in this lies the poetry of the text.
In Het Kind van de Smid, Josse De Pauw and Peter Van Kraaij
create the possibility for the individual to sustain himself in an
intersubjective relationship with time by way of a poetic narration.
The two half-brothers metaphorically embody the universal
dialectic between an internalised search for connections in life (as
31 / Kritisch Theater Lexicon - 14 e - August 2001