Le Tangible

One of the original founders of the Belgian theater collective tg STAN, Franck Vercruyssen is the group’s political conscience, behind shows like “One 2 Life”, treating capital punishment, “The Monkey Trial” from a transcription of the Scopes Trial, and “JDX – A Public Enemy”, an adaptation of Ibsen’s play about one man’s struggle to stand up to political and social hypocrisy. He is also drawn to dialogue between the spoken word and dance and has signed several pieces exploring their interfaces: “Nusch”, “Quartett” and now “L’intangible”. This equally ambitious and poetic piece builds on the choreography of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker to treat the Middle East conflict, with a text derived from writings by poets Etel Adnan (Lebanon), Mourid Barghouti, Mahmoud Darwich and Samih al-Qasim (Palestine), and the British novelist and essayist John Berger.

The principle story comes from Berger’s From A to X, in which A’ida writes to her lover, imprisoned for his political positions, of her struggle outside with military aggression, political injustice, loss and fear. To dramatize her story, Vercruyssen has chosen an empty stage onto which a series of photographic images unfolds, of buildings and streets in anonymous locales of apparently Middle Eastern origin (taken in Beyrouth and Palestine). Beneath their changing façade, three dancers echo and amplify A’ida’s struggle to hold on to hope, with a corporal language that gains in force with the evocation of her daily existence while embodying its unspeakable silences as well. The layers of spoken, visual and gestual narrative, not to mention written (in simultaneous Arabic and French translations), explore the range of A’ida’s emotional response as well as the mutism of her lover, who writes onto her letters but never sends any of his own. The show’s title comes from a line in Berger’s text where, commenting on the loss of physical property in the wake of a bombing, the narrator is led to consider the “amnesia of the tangible world”, where homes and possessions are unable to resist artillery to bear lasting witness to lifelong struggles to exist, a theme underscored tellingly by Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Yazan Al Khalili’s photography.

Vercruyssen has found a richly multiple language to explore a conflict not often the subject of contemporary theater and the resultant loss of cultural wealth and resources, among the debris of human lives. In a booklet accompanying the show, he relates in detail STAN’s efforts to create the show with actors from Naplouse and Damas, the courage and patience of these drama students caught between Belgian immigration policy and university regulations at home, and the ultimate, final-hour failure of the project. The planned cast is replaced in the show now running by Franco-Egyptian actress Eve-Chems de Brouwer and the Iraki actor Modhallad Rasem. Its own lived testament to the conflicts that mine and undermine past and present history in the Middle East, “Le Tangible” blends esthetic and political concerns in a surprising but highly intelligent and thoughtful approach to the question, an approach STAN, as always, does best.

To Nov. 13, Tues-Sat, 9 pm, matinees Nov. 13, 14, 5 pm, Théâtre de la Bastille, 76 rue de la Roquette, 11e, Mº Bastille, 13€-22€, tel: 01.43.57.42.14, Festival d’Automne, tel: 01.53.45.17.17.

Photo Credit: Lore Baeten