WIM VANDEKEYBUS

THEATER IS JUST A VERY ARTIFICAL MEDIUM. IT’S NOT NATURAL FOR 1000 PEOPLE TO SIT DOWN IN FRONT OF SOMETHING, WATCH IT AND THEN WALK OUT AGAIN

Everything that surrounds us generates associations. Are there places that inspire you on such measures that they are of great relevance to your work?

I have always tended, similarly in photography, to strive for the pure matter. Not just a piece of land and then a piece of sky, but pure land and pure sky. I believe that this attitude has inspired me very strongly to also create space through the fact that you frame a scene as you would like to capture it on film. It is not so much a place an sich that inspires me, but rather the features and characteristics of a space with which I want to create a certain atmosphere.

I have never worked with a scenographer because they often want to fill the empty space, while what I do is give as little direction as possible and leave the dance possibilities and escape routes open. Empty spaces are really inspiring. What fascinates me are spaces that have no walls. Actually, people don't need walls. The first thing you do when you buy a house is knock out the walls. Then again, places with lots of walls are also super inspiring. We humans build walls all the time. Also psychological walls. There are lots of theater and dance pieces about how people panic when they are surrouned by walls they built themselves and realise it is too late to destroy them.

When you start something new, how do you build up the story? What forms the underpinnings of new work?

I am a storyteller where movement is a function of the message I want to convey. People don't just move. They move because they want to say something, because they want to communicate something. So first of all I have to determine what story I want to tell and why people move the way they do. Once I have decided that, I am very good at reworking it into dance and a piece of music that I want to suggest. The writing process is thus a collage of many things. It's an incredible puzzle where the theme, the location, scenography, lighting, casting and so on have to coincide. One of the previous shows, “Mockumentary of a Contemporary Saviour”, was a science fiction project where a fictional Messiah from the future saves seven people and puts them in a safe room. They had to be very different people, both in stature and ethnicity. I always try to create situations that question what already exists, that create something you couldn't have expected at all. I write very little down, by the way. Ideas mostly accumulate in my head and out loud I tell the story until the ends are tied up. There's always something coming up and then I forget something again which comes back and comes in handy later. I see the big picture and as long as I understand what it has to be I'll get there. Structured chaos. I also never have a script in hand and just do it. Sometimes when I'm directing a scene an assistant will come and say: "Wim, that scene or that element has been out for eight weeks."

How do the works you write and compose come about? Are they usually fragments on which to embroider, new commitments and connotations from past memories?

Memories are somewhat exhausted at some point, especially at my age. I get inspired by the stories of others that come to my ears and make new associations, links and connections to use in my works. I have an awful nose for that. You don't have to have experienced it all yourself to imagine what something could have been.

Sometimes I have a hard time with imposed works. It can be enlightening because then you have a clear, demarcated structure, but in general these cannot be set in time. I then imagine it on a different dance floor or with different costumes so that the work can live on in my mind. It is often the case that animals or trees adapt to the environment and actually take on the same color. I am now thinking of a photo of a white rhino in the desert that was the exact same color as the ground it was standing on. Everything alive is fantastic. New things are killing. My works arise super chaotically, but mostly very intuitively.

It sometimes seems that the drive for innovation has equated the concept of beauty with the past. I don't think that's correct. Personally, I strongly contest that. Is beauty an aspect that attracts you to the process of creation and the final result? Is the search for beauty a relevant parameter in your work?

I understand what you are saying. Functionality is prioritized over aesthetic beauty these days. For a long time in theater, people thought that a human being is only pretty at their front for example. When you work with dancers in an opera or classical ballet, you also notice that they are constantly looking in the mirror at how they look. They are constantly projecting. Therefore I chose to work out some productions in which my dancers move with their backs to the audience as a kind of ode to beauty that was not accepted before. 

Steering a gaze and the importance of light in this is also super important. Occasionally you have to guide people in their observation to what is clean before they have missed it. For example, backlight is much more interesting than frontlight - this is just as true in photography or cinema - because you generate a kind of depth, darkness and mystery. Frontlight shows what it actually is and leaves nothing else to the imagination. Olafur Eliasson is a light illusionist who rather seeks beauty linked to experience. The images he creates are based on natural elements such as water, wind, air... Maybe you know his image with this sun?

I see the present as a combination of fascination with the past and enthusiasm for the future. The love for knowledge that is already there and the excitement for what may yet happen to it. How does the past and the future stand for you in relation to today and to you as a human being?

Although the tension between the past and the future is so interesting, sometimes theater just feels very responsible to tell something about the present. Current events nowadays determine what the next performance will be about and I don't entirely agree. The content of my work is based more on the repetition of history than on the issues of the present, since those lessons are so universal. When you repeat a situation and translate it into the present world, sometimes it says so much more. That's why I love science fiction. That's an assumption of the future that takes inspiration from the eighties in a way. It often has something retro about it, which is bizarre. As if we've lost something in the future that we need to retrieve from the past.

Most of the stories I work out are somewhat timeless. I wrote “What the body does not remember” in 1997 and it was actually quite visionary at the time. Instinctive, inevitable action was the central theme and my catastrophic imagination could be worked out in it. It was about fear, power, losing certainty - themes you would read in today's newspaper if you opened it. But don't forget that it was the time when people were allowed to smoke in an airplane. You can't imagine that now. One was allowed to do whatever they wanted. It was the time of do whatever. That time has now changed and free has given way to uncertainty. The future is linked to the infinite, the puny, the self relativizing. It can only exist because you are finite. Drama theater would never exist if we were not mortal. I make fictional, disappearing things that live because they die.

We try to make sincere architecture. For a process of creation, a long process of observation is a kind of sincerity that you look for because you're going to look at it long enough to understand something. Is sincerity a theme in your evolution and work?

The credibility of a scene is incredibly important. You're always looking for drama, for something real, and you've only succeeded when people are with you and believe the play. If they don't feel it, the play doesn't work and you've sadly failed. To pursue this sincerity, a long creative process is usually better. Of course, you become more and more experienced and can make decisions faster, but it always makes sense to knock out long days to come up with something you really didn't think you could create yesterday.

On the other hand, it's also nice to force yourself to keep up the pressure. Especially when you're a little more well-known, sometimes you go for something fast. You take a risk, since expectations remain just as high but you go about it in a different and shorter way, which can lead to dissatisfaction. I don't care about that. Critics are so stuck in what they expect and are no longer fresh at all. They have seen everything, compare everything with everything and don't look at it like a normal audience. Their judgment is hard to predict. I've had the lid on my nose many times, but you shouldn't care. By traveling and touring a lot, I can sense myself where I've made a mistake. Perfection doesn't exist. What is finished is dead.

Is there a building or a square that has had a very relevant influence on you as a person? What place offers the combination of peace and inspiration for you and why? Does architecture or urbanity have a big impact on your creations?

I have to think about that. In Brussels, I find it difficult. I once filmed on the Tour&Taxis sites before it was renovated. Afterwards, we started filming there again and I consciously thought about the original function and how they had dealt with it. Something was made for something and then they used it for something else. Sometimes that fits and sometimes it doesn't fit at all. Like that incredibly large hall where the trains used to come in with all the goods. Now they're working there and renovating the place. What are they going to do with it? They're not going to build walls here now, are they? That would be such a shame. You have the airport in Madrid with all that wood, I like that very much. How do you come up with an airport at all? There are also buildings like the Duomo in Milan which I find hideous. I really don't feel like going in there. Give me an austere pyramid that arouses my complete curiosity and fascination.

I read that you often think in images. Do you stage an atmosphere to work in or is the environment irrelevant to the writing or thinking process that precedes new work? Do you sit in a place to reinforce an idea?

I don't really have that. It may sound odd, but I don't even have a work table at home. Here I try not to work at all because I want to make time for the little one there. I'm also generally not a country or city person anymore. I usually just work in the studio or on the road. I write on a plane, in a hotel room... The simpler the better.

Italian Chef Massimo Bottura claims that tradition can only be preserved by reinterpreting it. Do you follow this stance? How do you deal with tradition in your work?

Early in my career, I had the pretense of claiming that my pieces had no references. Everything I made was reinvented. After a number of pieces, however, you have to acknowledge that you are working on something that has been done before. Influence is something you can't avoid. It's about how you deal with the references you use. For example, I constantly forget where things come from. I can pick up something and be totally unaware of it, although I am experienced enough to always give it my own color and reinterpret things.  I also hate recognizable symbolism and you won't easily find it in my works. For the film “Blush”, for example, I was once inspired by the “Blechtrommel” and had a frog come out of the mouth of a sinking girl. In my assumption, she was dying and that reptile sought shelter in her skull. Everyone else expected that frog to turn into a prince and perhaps save her from death. I had never thought of a prince and did not immediately find the link, but later this interpretation coincided with the fairy tale.

The relationship between music and images is enormous. Music has such a present impact on the senses that it is indispensable to most people and to the images it supports. When I saw Blush in my studies I did not know Wovenhand. When I put this music on now it is impossible to do so without seeing red ghosts and thus connecting this completely to certain scenes of Blush. Do you yourself believe that there is music where the images or scenes are so relevant or engaging that the music loses its power without it?

It is true that music can evoke certain images as well as memories. However, to really listen to music, you would have to do it almost in the dark. Some people only want it that way too. Music is something magical, something abstract. It is everywhere. Like air. It fills space. It is actually incredible that the air we breathe is everywhere. And that many things are not everywhere. Like light, for example. Light that has nothing to collide with doesn't exist. That's so interesting. You have even more abstract things. As soon as you pronounce a word, people try to interpret it.

To come back to music; it shouldn't get boring. That's why I always put on different songs and genres. I also make sure that the music is not too decisive, especially the lyrics. Lyrics generate associations and that in all sorts of directions. In my opinion, lyrics should be simple and not too intellectual. Sometimes you play a show in Albania and you translate your lyrics into English after which you feel that nobody understands the intent of it. However, they do listen to the music and experience it as something different. Not everything we think accomplishes the same thing we think it would. Theater is just a very artificial medium. It's not natural for 1,000 people to sit down in front of something, watch it and then walk out again.

How relevant is structure and proportion in your work?

Structure and proportion have a lot to do with rhythm. If you're small, you can move really fast. If you're super big, you can't. Proportion also changes by sitting in the first or last row. By now I'm used to how something works and where someone should stand or how they should speak. The voice of someone who is amplified comes from everywhere. That's not so pleasant for the front row, but in the last row they can understand you well. Proportion is tested very hard especially in this day and age. You pick up the phone and you speak to your grandson in Australia as if he was sitting next to you. Those are proportions you can't imagine. When they used to say that in ten years or so everyone will be talking on the phone without a wire... We had a good laugh at that. It was less than five years later. Proportion is madness.

When one works out a choreography, one defines a place and a boundary. Is it essential for you that an audience is part of the place where the result is conveyed?

The audience is the fourth and most important wall of a stage and I often can't help but involve them in the performance, whether they want to or not. People just sitting in a chair is actually too easy. I prefer to give them some kind of role so that they are complicit in what is happening.

For example, I have now created a performance where the audience steps in and basically gets to do anything they want. We only use light to guide them in their actions, but every day they do something different which makes each performance different from the other. It is also important that the audience feels who are we. For my dancers, the performance is also different every day depending on our mood, temperament and character. I work with experienced people and I trust them to carry the piece in their muscular memory. You wonder at every performance what it will be like. It remains unpredictable.

I read your text about desire and indifference. Can you long for a space, for a city, for a square? How important is mystery in pleasing a place?

I could link mystery now more to the unknown. I've read an awful lot, seen a lot of things, seen a lot of cities. I used to find travel much more interesting because globalization has made a lot of cities look incredibly similar. You really have to try hard to get a cultural shock. I always long for the unknown, for something I've never seen before. You have people who always go to the same city, to the same hotel. That's so boring. I did used to go to the same farm repeatedly on a regular basis, but I would never go back there because I have nothing to do there anymore. The people who were linked to that landscape are no longer there. And I have nothing to do with the people who are there now. You also have cities where everything is perfectly organized, but where I have no feeling with the people who live there. Subconsciously you link spaces to people. That's just like a child who links a language to a person. Mom and dad speak Dutch, the grandma speaks German and the babysitter speaks Spanish.

For you, what is the relationship between humans and the infinite?

The infinite is a very incomprehensible concept. It exists only because we are mortal. People want to give meaning to their lives themselves by simulating them. We look for an expression of purity and beauty. Rituals that we have already lost, we try to maintain. We build and call that culture after which we want to preserve it. A building in itself actually simulates something as well. It is a setting. Every house should have an open wall to feel the concept of infinity. Instead, we put a wall, a door, another garage door with an electrical box next to it and all that is recorded and captured on film. That is the opposite of infinity. That's a sublimation of nonsense.

For you, what has been the most engaging moment of a performance that you attended and why?

I think of “Palermo Palermo”, one of Pina Bausch's most haunting works. This creation took place a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall and symbolized the beginning of a new era. It was actually quite beautiful and also appropriate as the performance begins with an incredibly large brick wall. People come up, the performance begins and at some point that wall falls over. BAF! Then they continue playing on those fragments and the stage is a metaphor for life as a challenging obstacle course. Another and somewhat more abstract example is when Jan Fabre tries to capture the voice of an opera singer in plastic bags. Those are certain things that really stick out. They are the sort of happenings that you can and should never forget. If you have one or two of those in your performance, then you can speak of a good one.

I read sometime that you can only make good music if you feel like making music and not if you have to. Can you agree with this position?

No, not really. Struggling with difficulties is part of the job. Often I don't feel like it or a conflict arises with someone you don't want to deal with, but even then you find something to build on. I love to create, but I’m always aware that I’m torturing myself a bit. I hardly have time to enjoy the beauty of a creation because it is fucking hard work. It's much more than a 9 to 5 job. You're constantly working on it.

Eventually it's finished and you suffer from post-depression because you were in a certain drive and now you don't know what to do with your time. It's not win or lose. I do like to fire myself up a little and be angry because something is not good enough. My work is too complex for me to just put myself into it when I feel like it. It's constant drudgery and I'm used to living with stress by now. Stress is part of the game.

How relevant is reality to your work?

Somewhat relevant, but the question you have to ask yourself is: what is reality? It's not just realizing what is real and what is not. My reality perhaps suffers a little too much from my work. When you find that your work has become your reality then you have to be careful. Maybe I don't live enough to inspire myself. Anyway, I'm not going to parachute, ski or go horseback riding to risk breaking three arms. If I were to write a piece about that, I can guarantee you it would be fucking shit. The problem is not that I have to step up, but that I first have to invent and then step up. On the other hand, I also don't need to spend ten years settling down and then waiting to burn out. I probably have had that before, but just didn't have the time to dwell on it. That's like rock stars who become famous at 18 and then at 35 feel like “I didn't live, I was just a rocker”.

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