“N.Q.Z.C.” is the title of a piece of experimental theater now running at the Théâtre de la Ville, and, according to its creator, the Belgian artist known as Wayn Traub, also an abbreviation for the Inquisition. As the strange title of an equally unusual show, “N.Q.Z.C.” reveals little about what is performed on stage – a multilayered story about love, self-sacrifice and the inability of those human aspirations to overcome the survival instinct in us all - but offers new perspectives on the themes explored recently in this column.
At 35 years old, Wayn Traub is the author of a large and eclectic oeuvre that has succeeded not only in helping the former Geert Bové exorcise more than a person’s fair share of family demons, ranging from pedophilia to incest to schizophrenia, but in making known this self-described narcissist to the Belgian public, with shows proclaiming his existence to all willing to see, hear and even taste the fruits of his indisputably fertile imagination: from the nine-month long SMAK Campaign where Traub illegally exposed, for one hour a day, a personally devised coat of arms at Gent’s Museum of Contemporary Art, to the seven-part “Mises en Traub” series where the author used his personal life as immediate performance material (confronting former friends and lovers on stage, for example), and the “Wayn Cakes” performance-as-comestible project of surprise-inside gâteaux sold in local bakeries.
With a Jesuit boarding school education, training in classical dance, cinema and painting and a manifesto cum university thesis on “Animal Theater”, Traub comes well prepared to follow a personal and artistic quest for quasi spiritual redemption and metaphysical transformation. He does so through an intensive borrowing of popularized medieval and Christian iconography blended with artifacts of natural history and choreography no less evocative of 1950s dance halls than 21st century discos. This “priest of the arts” as he has been dubbed with Belgian humor seems to play his role with great seriousness. The proof is in his more developed works of theater, of which “N.Q.Z.C.” is yet a preliminary study.
Currently an Associate Artist at Antwerp’s Het Toneelhuis, Traub first broke through in the highly creative world of Flemish theater with “Maria-Dolores” (2002), where he defined a style of “opera-cinema”, interweaving genres (film and medieval mystery play), narrative (three stories of four interrelated women) and time periods in a baroque tale of universal resonance in its themes of conception, death and regeneration. The play was the first in a series, followed by “Jean-Baptiste” (2004) and “The Comeback of Jean-Baptiste” (2006), where the Biblical prophet is reborn as an internationally famous crooner. “N.Q.Z.C.” is the follow-up to these symbolically and culturally loaded pieces that are nevertheless first and foremost personal “rituals” for Bové/Traub, placing him at the center of these explorations of self-revelation through the forms of theater and the codes of performance.
Developed through a year-long experimental workshop termed “Arkiology”, “N.Q.Z.C.” is apparently the prototype for the final piece of what Traub terms the “Maria-Magdelena” trilogy, which continues, ostensibly, to find contemporary and personal applications for Biblical iconography. Judging from “N.Q.Z.C.”, it is to be wondered what that final piece will look like, as it marks a break from the “opera-cinema” style which brought Traub his success and which helped lift his personal journey out of hermetic symbolism and into a lived world of collective experience. Here, the multiple layers of narrative and time, uniting an age-old tale of lovers separated by death and a modern story of an astronaut frustrated in life and love, never break out of their labyrinthine confines to touch or excite, despite an original use of hand lights for illumination and the lighter moments of Ludmilla Klejniak’s “dance-therapy”. Termed a “futuristic ritual”, by sole dint, apparently, of its references to space exploration, “N.Q.Z.C.” fails to bring us into Traub’s personal quest or dynamize our own quests as human beings, as ritual theater is meant to do. If there is a certain mystification surrounding Traub’s work, it is well deserved here : more hoax than mystery.
Photo: Simonne Moesen in "N.Q.Z.C.". Credit: Koen Broos
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