Interview with Kris Verdonck

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…

Your images are so visually striking and clear in their aesthetic, but they’re very complex in terms of the associations that they evoke. To me it seems as if they’ve fallen to Earth fully-formed because they’re so dense and complete. But in fact, as you’ve described, you start with texts, working closely with Marianne Van Kerkhoven to explore their content, using classical dramaturgical methods. So how do you come to these images that you use?

Well, that happens while I’m in bed! To describe the process, I’ll use Geert [Vaes]’s figure in End [who falls from above then moves in the opposite direction to the other figures] as an example. He’s based on Ludd: I was reading about the Luddites and thought it would be interesting to have, in this very mechanical Beckettian world, somebody who’s against the machine, somebody who still has this kind of ideology – which is even kind of cute, if you look at it now! Because they haven’t got a chance. There are still some Luddites around now: they communicate by computer, they’re all over the web. As far as I remember, computers are machines…! – So, the show depicts these figures moving in one direction, and then there is this kind of superhero who goes the other way. I’m trying to be as literal as I can, as concrete as I can: so this superman just falls out of the air, he can’t fly. But he doesn’t give up. He goes to the other side and he falls again but he doesn’t give up. Just as the other figures don’t give up. They carry on: they just do it like we all do our daily jobs. I aim to take one idea and hang onto it until the bitter end. When one figure is being formed I won’t stop working on it until it’s ready; that process can take as long as two years.

How did you go about finding, selecting and ordering the texts?

They’re almost all internet-based texts. The inspiration for our search was a book by Sir Martin Rees (the British Royal Astronomer) – Our Final Century – about how we will destroy the world in this century. He gives eight possible endings: warfare, terror, climate change, diseases and so on. Then we decided that within these eight themes we wanted to be as concrete as we could: these words have to be real, as all performances are real, as Geert really falls. We had the idea of using testimony to bring this element of reality to the text. We started to look on the internet at real testimonies following on from events that fell into those eight categories, from actual disaster situations. In our first conversation with Johan [Leysen, the figure who speaks the text], we said “you’re the survivor, you’re the one who can tell the story, so you continuously talk. There’s no structure at all, just keep on going.” I don’t tell Geert how to fall, I don’t tell Claire [Croizé] how to pull the body bag. As long as they stay within their cycle somehow, I don’t really care what sort of smaller movements they do. I don’t care in which order Johan speaks the words. We gave him 250 pages of hell, the worst things that have ever happened. He asked me, “how am I going to say this?” and I replied, “yes, exactly: as an actor, how are you going to say those things in a way that’s as concrete as Geert falling, without sounding melodramatic? How are you going to talk about what happened in Chernobyl, for example?” The problem was that the text is much more abstract than what the other performers are doing. Then Johan came up with a style of delivery where it doesn’t really matter if you don’t understand him perfectly; he’s like a radio during a war, continuously making announcements.

You often explore apocalyptic themes in your work: why does that interests you so much?

The history of performance [art] has its roots in the invention of the atomic bomb. From then on “the object” started to mean something new, in the sense that it could now destroy the world. It was the first time in human history that we could destroy the world ourselves. Even now you can see that technology pollutes the whole planet, and we think we are also going to save it with technology – “we’ve got new cars”, “we can do better”, “we’ve got brand new clean technology”. We count on the object to clean the planet – we ourselves are not going to change anything, we’re not going to change the way we eat or drink, or drive our car less – we just want new technology. So the relationship between humans and objects is one that has a huge influence on this planet now. We sit behind our computers for eight hours a day, and then we get fat, and don’t move any more. There’s a picture I saw once, of a fitness centre. There are stairs and an escalator up to the entrance, and everyone takes the escalator to go up to the gym! Human beings and objects have a really strange relationship.

Are you pessimistic about the future? Do you think there’s any hope for the world or for humankind?

I really haven’t got a clue, but it would be nice if we had these flying cars that didn’t pollute – and maybe it might happen! Stephen Hawking posed a question on Altavista: “do we have to continue in this way? Is there any way we can stop the destruction?” Then the best answer was selected: “We can’t stop. We can agree ‘okay, let’s stop’, but we can’t actually stop. What would we do then? So we continue.”

Do you use performance as a medium because the audience’s relationship with it is sometimes reflective of people’s relationships with objects and machines – at times difficult, or maybe a power struggle?

I, II, III, IV and End haven’t got classical theatrical tension. The audience see I and II, and then III, and I can feel them thinking, “is he going to do IV?” Well it’s in the title so of course I’m going to do it! In classical or Shakespearean frameworks, there are specific dramatic changes and a narrative line. As an audience, we really expect that sort of structure, we really want it. There’s a lot of potential frustration in being denied it. With my approach I’m trying to point to something else, to little details, to the way the figures perform their actions. I’m trying not to hide behind a Hollywood-style climax and denouement, or a beautiful story you can just follow easily. I’m asking the audience to watch a little bit differently, and to really be with my performers, and see the way they try to manage to live inside a system. So the performance aims to demand another kind of tension from the audience. Of course, it’s a big ask, and I completely understand if people can’t go along with it.

So are you hoping in this work, and in your other work, that the audience might recognise themselves in these figures?

That would be a high goal. I haven’t worked out for myself why I do theatre. It’s not really necessary for me to do big tours of Europe to show my work – I’ve got my own little goals, and if I can play around with them it’s alright. In the next year I’m going to make much more small-scale work again. For me it’s about the language and structures that I want to explore. I don’t really care about the audience much, to be honest! It’s hell for me up there when the audience comes in, I just want to leave!

So why do you make work?!

I haven’t got a clue! Because I can’t do anything else, I just continue!!! [Makes jogging movement with arms as though on a treadmill.]