#dounia mahammed | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thissurroundingall · 6 years

Photo

Lisaboa Houbrechts

Scared yet generous.

Dutch translation

Date of interview: October 11, 2018

Estimated reading time: 18 minutes

Behind the doors of Toneelhuis’ attic rehearsal room, one can hear a horrifying screeching. We lunge right into the fourth act of the Hamlet-adaptation of Lisaboa Houbrechts (°1992, Zonhoven) and her company Kuiperskaai, rehearsing for their premiere later that week. Hamlet (Victor Lauwers) plants a knife in his real life mother's (Grace Ellen Barkey) crotch, while Polonius emerges from under her skirts. Mythic and ambiguous images often overlap in the work of Lisaboa and Kuiperskaai. “Alright, we stop here!” Lisaboa looks at her companions, as if she is witnessing them sacrificing every vessel in their body in honour of the performing arts for the first time.

The same luscious passion for theatre is central to our conversation a few weeks post-premier. With an enormous enthusiasm, she always circles back to her reading of Shakespeare and Hamlet, to the importance of dialogue between layers of time. Lisaboa settled for a longer time in the eponymous location in Ghent with Kuiperskaai, but decided to make the move to Brussels almost a year and a half ago. These days, they are co-housing with Needcompany in MILL, an impressive art deco cigarette factory. Sunlight brightens the rehearsal rooms, ateliers and offices where Lisaboa guides us around, wearing her typical booties. The young company has been fairly busy the last few years. After a series of theater pieces presented at various theater festivals in Belgium and abroad, Lisaboa could now work on the large stage thanks to the P.U.L.S. program (Project for Upcoming Artists for the Large Stage). The desire to break out of the black box though, is also present in MILL, where Oscar van der Put (scenographer) is busy creating pieces for EXPLO when our interview takes place, a two-day event presenting performances, an exhibition and films. Jack-of-all-trades they seem, but Lisaboa prefers not to use the word multidisciplinary. “This is most importantly an open space where things can come together.”

Toneelhuis/Lisaboa

Kuiperskaai

The legendary space where Kuiperskaai lived and worked has been etched in the memory of the Ghentian theatre scene. How do you look back upon the move to Brussels now? How has it influenced your work?

The battle has become more real. It definitely had an impact, although it wasn’t a conscious choice. Kuiperskaai was sort of a cocoon, also because Ghent as a city is more compact. You know everyone and suddenly there’s an incrowd. In Brussels, you get confronted with a totally different city, much more complex and chaotic.

We (Victor, Romy, Oscar and Lisaboa) don’t live together anymore here in Brussels. I meet the others in a different way now. We have become more individual. The constant balancing on the border between life and art was exciting; everyone was intrigued. It almost turned into a phenomenon that one couldn’t grasp: what are these people doing there together? In the beginning, we lived in tents in this open space, then we decided to paint them and it turned into an exposition. Those elements ended up in our theatre work. Everything was very fluid, also the border between each other’s artistic practices. Now we find ourselves in a different phase, where you have to rely on yourself much more. What I want to say with my work has become a lot more personal because of that. In Ghent it was more about the collective.

So you don’t really miss it?

I thought I would find it much more difficult. Kuiperskaai is where our anchor lies. Starting Kuiperskaai was the only way to believe in what I do. It takes some guts to think you can put your work on a stage, show something that people will want to see. That could only happen because the four of us trusted each other. Now that we are anchored, it’s about finding the relevance of what we want to continue.

In the past, the house was the artwork.

Do you live in a stuffed apartment then, or is it more minimal now?

No, my apartment at the moment is really just a place to sleep. In the past, the house was the artwork. That’s why the encounter is even clearer in the performances now, also in everyone’s personal artistic practice. The entire universe that Kuiperskaai was, now maybe resides in one artwork of Oscar (van der Put, visual artist). It’s a past that we carry with us, that resonates in our work. The chaos of life, of living together, that’s over.

How did you end up in the theatre scene?

I grew up in Limburg, between Kiewit and Zonhoven, in a very green environment. My childhood was mostly spent in the forest. I wanted to work on a farm when I was younger (laughs). That was a special time, very much like a fairytale. At the same time, I noticed the narrow-mindedness of a village, the claustrophobia and tangle of trauma within a family.

When I was twelve, we moved to Hasselt and I started art school. I was playing theatre already, but I mostly made dance-based pieces together with Georges Ocloo. We always received very extreme reactions. When we were dancing in our underwear, everyone was only talking about that pair of knickers. I felt the need to escape that as quickly as possible, to move somewhere else. Ghent was the best option. I wanted to play, channel my emotions through acting, so I could comfort myself and others. Only later during the KASK training, I realized that I possessed a certain imagination beyond my own body, which I could work with. The endlessness of possible expressions wasn’t to be found in my own body. I was much more focused on bringing people together. Quitting performing myself was an important decision.

So actually, dance was the starting point for you, movement?

Even before I created De Schepping (2013), I made Mother is a Mountain, a movement piece about transgender figures in the Old Testament and Greek myths, together with Dounia Mahammed. After that, I felt I needed a text to work with. From there, I went to staging Shakespeare and other repertoire. After a while though, the structure becomes so compelling that now, after working on Hamlet, I feel like I want to do it differently and no longer be a slave to chronology and narrativity.

Is your work a personal take on what is currently happening in the #metoo-debate?

I have been developing reflections on the position of the woman in history in my work for a longer time already. The previous piece 1095 is a portrait of two women left behind by crusaders during the 11th century. With Hamlet I wanted to talk about the almost wordless mother Gertrude, played by the endearing Grace Ellen Barkey. I asked Grace to defend Gertrude and rewrote the piece based on that. Of course you get sucked into the debate then. Although I explicitly highlight the relation between Hamlet and the women in his life, it doesn’t originate from #metoo. Hamlet leans against the discussion about the representation of the woman figure in repertoire of course, but is not about that. The #metoo-debate luckily has a huge impact on the cultural scene. I think it’s absolutely essential, but I don’t necessarily feel the need to make a concrete statement in my work. I try to solve it in my own poetics, within the poetry of theatre language.

I try to solve it in my own poetics, within the poetry of theatre language.

You constantly go back to a faraway past, but do more recent time segments also intrigue you? I’m always reminded of a certain seventies glamrock vibe when I see your creations.

Yeah, that also occurred to me, that we always go back pretty far in time… The last thing you see in Hamlet though, is a queer version of Fortinbras wearing sunglasses, like a new ruler of these times. Those are the new powers, the Mark Zuckerbergs. But we never started from something contemporary indeed. Nevertheless I found it incredibly important to introduce Hamlet totally in pink as a queer symbol, also as a poetic statement. I have the feeling that I am very much grounded within this day and age. I am fascinated by history and repertoire. Those things are very inspiring to me in appearance. Dealing with that always implies some sort of nostalgia. Nostalgia is not immediately a negative word. Nostalgia is about losing yourself in details. It’s about a sort of ritual deed. You dive into that detail and stumble upon the overarching idea that humankind throughout history has always been caught up in a chain of passions.

So you don’t see nostalgia as a lack of something?

No. Yesterday I saw William Forsythe’s A Quiet Evening of Dance and that thought became very clear for me in that piece. What he does is letting a talented break-dancer dance on 17th-century music. A sublime poem. It’s about tearing two types of métier. Those breakdance moves flow seamlessly into Forsythe’s typical language of movement, but also 17th-century court ballet and Beyoncé. Through this friction between layers of time, a crack, an in-between time comes into existence. A fascination for the past, which is nostalgia, leads towards a form of timelessness. It doesn’t hinder the timeless.

A fascination for the past, which is nostalgia, doesn’t hinder the timeless.

In between your last two plays, you also assisted Alain Platel with Requiem pour L. How did that go?

Through working with les Ballets C de la B I got in touch with a different kind of theatre. I ended up in situations where I wouldn’t have that quickly with Kuiperskaai. Moving to Brussels also played a role within this. Precisely because you are on your own here, having to rely on yourself, you are able to feel the warmth of the moment and you are open to other influences. Other artists’ practices make me reflect about my own work. Thinking together with Alain about the cocoon of the Western theatre tradition was a very liberating experience.

But I also discovered Brussels again together with the fantastic performers from Requiem, who took me to parties in the Matonge quarter, where you wouldn’t end up yourself. Or you would find yourself having plantain fufu with fourteen in a tiny hotel room on tour in Berlin. Those are interesting pathways of awareness to explore.

Last time we met during the last week before the premiere. But what does a standard creation day look like for you?

During such a period of extreme rehearsal, nearing the premiere, we start around ten and work all day until seven. After the rehearsal I am alone and prepare for the next day. Now whilst developing a new creation, I try to follow my own rhythm as much as possible, shut myself off for everyone to dive into books and write.

How do you relax? Do you need to turn everything off sometimes?

That makes me a little uneasy, when everything stops. Too many questions pop up in my head. I struggle with it, also now after premiering Hamlet. You have been focusing for so long on something. Who am I? What do I feel? What I feel has a lot to do with what I love. (silence) And I love a lot. Not only theatre. Art has not always been a part of my life, so I’m already incredibly happy that I can believe in theatre, in art. Going to see a good performance is total relaxation for me, but at the same time it gets me in the mood for work again.

How do you identify with words that appear in reviews of your work: baroque, wanton, epic? Does that speak to you?

I find those words very broad terms most of the time. The first negative feedback I ever got was “It’s a little too baroque.” I’ve never really understood that. I also don’t think that our last piece is still a very baroque creation. Refinement is important for me.

Look: I absolutely love the people I collaborate with. And those people are a lot. Shakespeare carries a lot of weight as well. I try to bring all of this together into what I love myself. Sometimes it seems like we don’t know any fear, because we make generous gestures towards the people we work with. Of course we are scared, but everything is thought-through; it’s never anything goes. Métier is very often neurosis and obsession. I’m very obsessively occupied with detail. Maybe I should watch out with that. It might be in that clash that a language arises that the audience experiences as very excessive. Sometimes I need to lose grip, let something be imperfect. That only emphasizes the idea of perfection. This gesture of colouring one side half and the other side totally, passes through as baroque I guess.

Sometimes it seems like we don’t know any fear, because we make generous gestures towards the people we work with. Of course we are scared. But it’s never ‘anything goes’.

And does it resonate as well with Lisaboa as a person?

I’ve been struggling with it for a long time, with the idea of being too much, too baroque. After some time I decided to embrace it. Everyone just kept saying it. Nowadays I go to a museum, sit in front of a Rubens and think: well, actually it ain’t that bad. If it’s that, then it’s that. I can take it as an inspiration, leave the criticism aside. I recognize the extravagance in myself. But everyone is baroque I think, everyone is a lot. An inscrutable world of feelings resides inside everyone. It’s all about perfecting and making consequent what you bring into your work of that. That’s something you develop over the years.

Nowadays I go to a museum, sit in front of a Rubens and think: well, actually it ain’t that bad.

A statement of yours that I will always remember, is “Pulling history through your own body.” What do you mean by that ?

That sentence was originally a stage direction, something very concrete. It was an exercise during rehearsals, when we wanted to evoke the year 1095. I asked a performer to literally appear out of the mud of the past centuries to tell her story. That’s how we ended up with this particular primal scream at the beginning of the play. It became something bigger in the end. You have to pull history through your own body and see what’s left concerning your own time. It’s about becoming aware of your own gaze. Political events like crusades determine our intimate experiences of love, fear, religion, self-reflection… The political always imposes itself on the intimate. By making something so ‘tiny’, you pull history also through yourself. You need to examine the frame through which you show the historical.

Ophelia in Hamlet is an old-fashioned ideal of a woman who doesn’t really exist. The girl only lives because of her father. Romy struggled a lot with that and how she was supposed to play her. We took her gaze on the problematic position of Ophelia into the play, without having to introduce a meta moment. A lot of repertoire theatre is ironical or meta, a method to step out of the story and make it ridiculous or irrelevant. Why would you continue then? I wanted to stay in the anecdote. I am in love with Hamlet and his battle. I don’t think that battle doesn’t exist anymore today. Lucidity is connected to dragging history through your own body, which can lead towards regions of spirituality, from the divine to the frenzied.

What do you mean by anecdotes actually? And what are bad anecdotes?

I’ve once made that distinction in an interview indeed, between bad and good anecdotes. I don’t think that’s true anymore. Something anecdotally bad can still say something about a certain time.

But you don’t see anecdotal as personal?

No, I see the anecdotal in theatre as specific elements, such as “The shepherd arrives and tells the king he has found a bag full of gold.” These kind of anecdotes in historical texts are not as timeless as one thinks. The fragment about the shepherd still touches upon the fundament of that time though. Working with bad anecdotes would be staging that without obligation, on a filmic level without asking any questions.

And the anecdote as autobiographical material?

The autobiographical aspect is absolutely not bad for me. The work of Louise Bourgeois is anecdotal, hyperpersonal, almost perverse but I find it wonderful. She has based her entire oeuvre on a personal drama. She continues to wallow in the same old tragedy - her father cheating on her mother with the nursemaid - but extracts such a diversity of multilayered images from it, about femininity, about the problem she has with masculinity. That is so personal, so microscopically hyperrealistic - it could have been set in Zonhoven.

Is that also to be found in your work?

I don’t know if I should answer that. Everyone has secrets of course, secrets I don’t even share with the others. But I find it very inspiring to see how an artist like Bourgeois turns a secret into a myth.

The mixing of dialects is a recurring characteristic in the last plays. Do you have a specific fascination for language, or is it a specific kind of humour?

Both I guess. The first time I read Shakespeare, I noticed something about the language. He has innovated language, his work lies between the old and new English. That intrigued me: how can an in-between language generate a new language? Besides that I also link it to the comical aspect of Shakespeare. The slang used in the shepherds’s scene in The Winter’s Tale is Shakespeare’s commentary on the Scottish domination after Elisabeth’s death. The more I estranged the text, the more incomprehensible and better it became. Language became image. Also the universe of Pieter Bruegel de Oude, which I’m working on right now, knows a similar atmosphere: what is Old Dutch actually? It’s a way to think about the weight of language in our work.

What kind of reactions did you get abroad?

We played 1095 in Poznan at Malta Festival. The festival, one of the biggest in central Europe, fought against the far-right government. The play resonated a lot with the audience and got received with loud cheers. In a very conservative climate, such an extreme play has an enormous effect: Seppe Decubber who plays a right-wing fundamentalist, as a homosexual man, two women kissing with each other, monks dancing around naked… Those contemporary references in combination with fragments of history make up an explosive totality, which obviously generates reaction. According to me, fiction as a way to deal with history can be a political statement. It doesn’t always have to be a lecture. 1095 is not a totally vacuum world and those reactions abroad prove that.

Fiction as a way to deal with history can be a political statement. It doesn’t always have to be a lecture.

You emphasize the importance of the visual for Kuiperskaai. Where do you draw inspiration from?

At the moment, there is a lot of Bruegel on my table, in preparation for the new piece, but also van der Weyden. Artists who mean a lot to me are Pierre Huyghe, Jimmie Durham, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Apichatpong Weersathakul, etc. It’s very diverse, I also like installation art. So on the one hand very classical works, but also contemporary work.

I inherited the fascination for film from my father. He collects movies, his collection is a real gem. Andrej Tarkovski has left a deep impression on me when I was a teenager, but equally more contemporary work: Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Béla Tarr, Kim-Ki Duk or Fien Troch. I like rough, ritual and silent work. Also seeing classics like Fellini, Bergman, Teshigahara and Lang has formed me. Early cinema had to work very installative to generate effect. Fellini taped together black garbage bags to evoke a sea in Casanova. Having the pretense to think you can still tell a story with that poetical, clumsy approach, I find very beautiful.

Where do you position yourself in this oversaturated visual and theatre culture?

Interesting question. We have indeed seen everything already in the performing arts scene; the biggest revelations, the most refined universes. How do you relate to that? I don’t know. That’s one of the reasons why it stops for me sometimes. I don’t know a lot of young makers who still want to tell that kind of great stories; it’s almost immoral to still defend that. I find that quite exciting. What bursting out of the academy and meeting Kuiperskaai has taught me is to embrace everything in the generosity life offers you. I try to be critical for tradition, but I also don’t want the critique to block me. I want to create something from the interaction between those two.

What bursting out of the academy and meeting Kuiperskaai has taught me is to embrace everything in the generosity life offers you.

And what about social media?

Our work generates a lot of reaction because of slowness. We are looking for the elasticity of time. That’s something I notice when schools come to see our plays. When I’m asked to write a text for theatre, they tell me how young people would have a much shorter attention span because of social media. Everything needs to be captured in short terms. We confront the audience with very contemplative images. Contemplation demands time. Opposed to those flashy images on social media, I want to create a world where you can dive into yourself. That’s where contemplation and ambiguity are connected. Maybe that’s also why for me it’s difficult to uplift ambiguity in favour of an explicitly political discourse.

Making a sort of total art, a Gesamtkunstwerk as you wish, has that always been a goal of yours?

It’s more about the urge to work together with various types of artists. Even before I met the other people at Kuiperskaai, I tried to bring people from different backgrounds into my work. I’ve always been looking for a kind of impossibility. The first impulse ever was working with different media. I would never call it combining media anymore, because that doesn’t even begin to cover it. Multidisciplinary is a term I don’t believe in, an ugly word.

I’ve always been looking for a kind of impossibility.

Can you think of a different word?

Something with the word inter-… It’s still very difficult. Multidisciplinary is a little bit too much anything goes. There needs to be an essence to it, where everything is bound together already. The expression has just shattered into various manifestations. Those are one altogether. It’s not simply about adding something.

What’s the role of theory in your work?

Theory is about being emotionally attracted by a historical topic for me. Hamlet is a gold mine in this respect. It makes me reflect about a complex character in a mythical world on the one hand and the historical and contemporary world on the other.

Theory or repertoire opens itself to me as a huge archive. I like to dive into it. Some have problems with the fact that Erwin Jans gives me advice, because he’s part of an older generation. That’s just an archive that opens up. You can’t be blind for that archive, because where do you end up then? Theory opens up all those doors to possible interpretations, but as a theatre maker you’re forced to close doors behind you again. If you don’t do that, you don’t get anywhere. Then I would be better off writing an essay instead of creating performances.

Interview and translation: Tessa Vannieuwenhuyze

Photography: Astrid Theunynck

Dutch editor: Britt Sterkens

English editor: Tyche Beyens

Special thanks to Staf Nys & Maxim Ryckaerts

0 notes