De Pauw (Engels) - depot voor het VTi

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[6] De meid slaan (after Baudelaire, Lucebert, Sidney Michaels, Strindberg, Kotaro Takamura, Josse De Pauw, Tom Jansen). 1993-1994. Actors: Josse De Pauw, Tom Jansen, Fumiyo Ikeda. Directors: Josse De Pauw, Tom Jansen. Production: Kaaitheater, Nationaal Fonds Amsterdam. De keizer van het verlies (Jan Fabre). Regie: Jan Fabre. Troubleyn, mei 1996. Met Dirk Roofthooft. artistic development: de pauw’s way and weg to De Pauw for his acting in these two plays says it all. But in the longer term it was mainly De Pauw’s position as a fully-fledged playwright that was established by these narrations. In 1991, for instance, he received the three-yearly State Prize for Dramatic Literature. In 1993, Ward Comblez was included in a German anthology of seven plays from the Dutch-speaking countries and in 1998 International Theatre & Film Books published a French edition of Ward Comblez and Het Kind van de Smid. A great many critics experienced the texts not so much as plays but as literary creations. The terms ‘epic’, ‘storytelling’ and ‘narrative theatre’ were frequently used to describe them. In De Standaard one could read that Het Kind van de Smid ‘does not comply with the characteristics of a traditional dramatic text’. ‘If it were not so easily performable one might venture to call it a ‘reading drama’. But fortunately that genre belongs permanently to the past. On the other hand the work lends itself more to reading than a great many other dramatic texts’. 14 Several journalists added to this by belittling the performance of the play, ‘Het Kind van de Smid … seems to me more suited to being read than acted. It has such a wealth of images which on stage are simply beaten flat’, 15 said Toneel Theatraal, and the reviewer in Knack ‘very much had the impression that reading the play is the best way to appreciate its poetry’. 16 One journalist went very far, writing, ‘I think this book is so fine that it might be better not to go and see the play’. 17 Nevertheless, De Pauw’s plays were not alone in Flemish dramatic literature in the second half of the eighties. Ward Comblez and Het Kind van de Smid do not comply with the traditional categories of theatricality. Their writing displays similarities with a contemporary discourse whose main elements are the ties with theatrical practice, the diversity of materials and disciplines and the uncompleted nature of the text (text developing on stage). Such requirements as direct dialogues and the deictic reference to a topical context are of less importance. 18 Dialogue/duologue: De meid slaan and Trots vlees In 1993, Josse De Pauw, together with the Dutch actor, director and author Tom Jansen, presented De meid slaan, produced by Kaaitheater and the Nationaal Fonds Amsterdam. Whereas Het Kind van de Smid still opted for narration in order that the actors 37 / Kritisch Theater Lexicon - 14 e - August 2001
josse de pauw did not get bogged down in their characters during dialogues, what we suddenly get here is a real dialogue play. This naturally has major consequences for the relationship between the actor and the script. Although the autobiographical reality of the friends De Pauw and Jansen is to some extent used in De meid slaan, the play can no longer be categorised as narrative theatre. During the performance, the acting is central to the direct confrontation with each other and with the audience. This is reflected in the fragmentary composition of the text (whose content was selected for its performability) and in the pleasure the actors have in performing. De meid slaan is, more than anything else, actor’s theatre. From an overall point of view, this acting is also a constant in the content of the play. Acting is seen as a means of survival, in which people position themselves in roles opposite each other in order to divide up the positions of power. In this respect language is the most important weapon. Sometimes the dialogues are sidetracked into a sort of cross-interrogation; then again the different voices speak in unison. Despite the great affinity between the real lives of the actor-authors and the play itself – the characters on stage are called simply Tom, Josse and Fumiyo – a certain distance is maintained. The dialectic between the people and the actors on stage provides for a constant tension between truth and imagination. The writing process was accompanied with an exchange of poetry, stories and music, over which they spoke on the basis of their own experiences or by linking it to events in the world. After the geography of Ward Comblez and the epic history of Het Kind van de Smid, we are now served with a spectrum of literary and cultural history. The authors made use of Baudelaire, Lucebert, Sidney Michaels, Strindberg and Kotaro Takamura. More and more personal elements were gradually added to the text. They took the title from Spanking the Maid by the American writer Robert Coover, a book about power relationships. No real story is told; though a few major themes can be pointed to: the piece is about the macho behaviour friends display ‘between themselves’. Two actors meet up again after a long time. In their armchairs, the two men awkwardly think up possible topics of conversation, with regular uncomfortable silences. They converse with each other by way of the literary texts or the plays they know: Jansen speaks about Baudelaire’s Le spleen de 38 / Kritisch Theater Lexicon - 14 e - August 2001 artistic development: de pauw’s way and weg Paris; the story of a man visiting a friend. De Pauw comes up with the first lines of a poem by Lucebert, stalls, thinks, and has it finished off by Jansen. The dialogue gradually evolves into an intellectual duel. All at once a Japanese woman appears behind a glass partition. It is Fumiyo Ikeda (who is in reality Josse De Pauw’s wife). Her presence upsets the male intimacy and gives a completely different turn to both men’s behaviour. They try to win her favour and overwhelm her with knowledge. Then they ask her to recite a Japanese poem. When she then translates the text into Dutch, her language is constantly and pedantically corrected. It ends in a violent argument because the host thinks Jansen is becoming too intimate with her. Fortunately a kitsch present of broken glassware is able to save their friendship. As has already been mentioned, friendship at work has been an abiding starting point throughout De Pauw’s stage career. The special thing about his kinship with Tom Jansen is their shared concern with acting. The two men got to know each other while shooting a trial film by Guido Hendrickx for the NOS television channel. What they recognised in each other was the way of acting, the pleasure of performance and the boldness needed to take risks. It was therefore no surprise that two years after De meid slaan, the two friends suddenly came up with their own production company, called Laagland, which was intended in the first place to function as a place where several like-minded artists could work together. The first Laagland production, Trots vlees, opened at Monty in Antwerp on 14 th June 1995. Just as in De meid slaan, the basis of this piece was friendship, the difference being that this time the starting point was an existing play which they had not written themselves: this was the one-act play Clearing in the Forest by the American writer James Purdy. This is also the major difference with the remaining, more or less independent productions by De Pauw. In fact the play was used in its entirety, though the actors did add their own opinions as well as various other texts to Purdy’s play, including a poem by Lucebert, an essay by the 19 th -century gastronome Brillat-Savarin and the tear-jerker ‘Een kleine foto van mijn meisje’ [‘A little photo of my girl’]. De Pauw touches on the underlying motivation for interpersonal communication in this production too: Purdy goes in search of intimacy, open wounds and the internal power balance lurking in 39 / Kritisch Theater Lexicon - 14 e - August 2001
Page 1 and 2: JOSSE DE PAUW BY JEF AERTS AND ANNE
Page 3 and 4: josse de pauw by the past is involv
Page 5 and 6: ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT: DE PAUW’S W
Page 7 and 8: josse de pauw Internationale Nieuwe
Page 9 and 10: josse de pauw (whereby the build-up
Page 11 and 12: josse de pauw the two protagonists
Page 13 and 14: josse de pauw I walk, hobble, stagg
Page 15 and 16: josse de pauw Smith). With a minimu
Page 17: [2] Ik wist niet dat Engeland zo mo
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Page 23 and 24: STRUCTURAL AND ARTISTIC CONTEXT Wit
Page 25 and 26: josse de pauw The wanderer in the l
Page 27 and 28: josse de pauw De Pauw to follow the
Page 29 and 30: WORK / THEATRE HISTORY Theatre The
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Page 33 and 34: josse de pauw Van Kerkhoven, Marian

De Pauw (Engels) - depot voor het VTi

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