Kris Verdonck’s End is a bleak, apocalyptic landscape through which humans and machines struggle, trapped in a continuous cycle that tests both audience, and theatrical form.
Urbanmag* spoke to Kris Verdonck about his work, and whether there’s hope for us yet…
Someone hands you a small piece of paper – a photograph of the Belgian flag, the pirate’s skull of another flag just visible through it. On the back is a letter from Anwar from Afghanistan, our official guide to ‘Belgium paradise – a small country with a big heart, where we as refugees and tourists can unite’. It says we will travel together, we will share this journey to find happiness all together, in a place where we will experience real cultural difference. You wait some more. Lees meer »
I read somewhere that to create this show you started by reading around 1000 speeches…?
I read speeches – and I watched them on Youtube – for a year, and I didn’t read anything else, apart from one Paul Auster novel! It was a commitment: every day I had to read some speeches. It’s the first time I’ve worked on my own, and I decided that instead of starting with a concept, I would read for a year, and sort the speeches I might be able to use into piles. I worked very intuitively. Lees meer »
Dear Tim,
Well, we’re down to this now. Me and you. The old one two.
To start with, I definitely agree: there’s something special happening here in Belgium. Unconventional, challenging, difficult voices are readily amplified by civic spaces and public resources. They’re accepted into the mainstream with a freedom and an openness that still isn’t quite there in Britain, where “experimental performance, live art, new work” and (plain old) “theatre” are, in the most part, two very separate worlds. The fact that you were invited to open the festival seems to me a good representation of the way things work here. “Outsiders” are welcomed, encouraged, and given a voice, even if we can’t speak the same tongue. Here the breaking, shaking, testing you described is well under way, no matter which toy-box it starts off from.
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