End

“The core of the world is hollow.” (Italo Calvino)

1.

II, the project that director and visual artist Kris Verdonck created in the Kaaitheater Studios during the 2005 edition of the Kunstenfestivaldesarts, was a collection of five pictures. Three of these – “Box”, “Patent Human Energy” and “Rain” – were not unlike installations: a situation one could look at, an environment one could walk around in and explore. In the other two – “Man” and “Duet” – the spectators were shown “a development”: they were seated in front of, or around, the action and watched from a distance, like an audience does in a theatre performance.

The challenge of the new project End lies primarily in Kris Verdonck’s decision to work in a large theatre space: spectators are seated in rows and look straight ahead at “something” being played out on stage. Within a single dramatic situation, a number of very diverse figures are shown on that stage: people, or objects, or a combination of both. With End, Kris Verdonck is walking the fine line between installation and theatre performance, exploring the space in which visual art and theatre coincide and where both, individually, realise their own essence and their paradoxical relation, their “being opposite”.

The difference between visual art and theatre has everything to do with Time. Does plastic art equal Space? Does theatre equal Time? When, as in End, the spectators are, from a spatial point of view, brought into a theatre code, only a specific management of Time on stage can prevent the performance from becoming entirely a theatre performance.

Installation equals situation. Theatre equals development, chronology, sequence of events. To a greater or lesser extent, each sequence of events inevitably leads to a form of narrative. The spectator has, after all, been primed to do his/her own work; namely, to look for connections between the events, to interpret each sign presented on stage. End seeks to avoid any narrative or chronology: the entire representation is grasped in one large, “abstract”, cyclical movement.

2.

End features ten Figures performing what could be the last stage of a human community. The starting point for End are the pictures we have all seen before, pictures which the media project daily onto our retinas: melting glaciers, burning forests, inundated cities, animal species threatened with extinction, the horrors of famine and war.... The Figures – machines and people as well as a combination of both – all move in the same direction, from one side of the stage to the other. Are they fleeing something? But if so, what? They disappear in order to reappear. Over and over again, they repeat this circular movement: like celestial bodies or satellites drawn into an orbit around the empty centre of the world. “The core of the world is hollow.”

These Figures have indeed “matured” in the course of the creative process: a whole evolution has taken place between their initial meaning and what they have finally become. For some Figures, their origins are worth knowing, while with others the initial images have faded or disappeared.

3.

The Figure leading this merry-go-round, who literally forces this (stage) world to revolve, is Stakhanov (1). Like Atlas, he heaves the whole world and sets the mechanism in motion. Like a basso continuo, he accompanies the entire performance.

A second basso continuo is formed by the Messenger’s almost uninterrupted storytelling: from within a moving glass cage on stage, he keeps on talking. In a series of interlinked stories, he relates the uncanny and/or catastrophic events which have taken place / are taking place / shall take place in the world. The Messenger’s textual materials were gathered from the work of, among others, Alexander Kluge, Curzio Malaparte, W.G. Sebald, Lord Byron, but also, and especially, from reports found on the Internet.

Two unnatural phenomena occur in the theatre space:

- Black snow (2) falls almost uninterruptedly.

- A moving fire occasionally crosses the stage.

Six other Figures also appear in the landscape:

- A woman drags a much too heavy body bag, which she, no matter what, wants to / has to carry somewhere.

- Hanging in the air – the Birdman attempts to complete his course.

- A hybrid, self-transforming being, the Musel-woman (3) errs across the stage.

- The Ludd (4) literally falls out of the sky. He is the only Figure to go against the flow of the circular movement.

- At times an autonomous engine appears on stage, an industrial witness, drifting through the landscape.

- A vehicle mounted with loudspeakers (5) crosses the stage, emitting scary, shrill voices.

The Figures are positioned in the moving landscape by means of interactive media and Anouck Declercq’s video projections, filled in with Stefan Quix’s music and lighting by Luc Schaltin.

Marianne van Kerkhoven

(1) This character refers to Alexei Stakhanov, the miner who, in the Soviet Union of the second half of the thirties, was held up to his comrades as a model worker: in a single day, he single-handedly mined 120 tons of coal instead of the 7 tons prescribed per miner. His feat, which many years later was revealed to be a fraud, led to an increase in the production rhythm in the mines.

(2) This phenomenon refers, on the one hand, to various forms of pollution and, on the other, to the nuclear fallout of Hiroshima, to all noxious materials falling from the sky....

(3) “Muselmann” was the name given in the Nazi concentration camps to inmates who had reached their uttermost limit: corpses “swaying” on their feet, rocking to and fro. The living who were already dead; barely human, in fact already a thing, an object, a corpse.

(4) Ned Ludd was an English weaver who in 1779 was the first to destroy a loom. His act of aggression against the industrial enemy generated many followers: the Luddites, or Ludds, grew in the 19th century into a social protest movement within the working class. In End, perhaps he is the doer, the saviour, or maybe the brave fireman of 9/11 who confronts danger.

(5) This image refers to cars mounted with loudspeakers which, during the Second World War, were driven around German cities to warn the population about incoming air raids. Sometimes they were still being driven around when the houses were already in ruins.