Playful by nature

In 1957 Witold Gombrowicz wrote in his diary:  

“Why, my man is created from the outside, that is, he is inauthentic in essence - he is always not-himself, because he is determined by form, which is born between people. His ‘I’, therefore, is marked for him in that ‘interhumanity’.’ An eternal actor, but a natural one, because his artificiality is inborn, it makes up a feature of his humanity - to be a man means to be an actor - to be a man means to pretend to be a man - to be a man means to ‘act like’ a man while not being one deep inside - to be a man is to recite humanity.”

Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) is regarded as one of the most exceptional writers in Polish literature. Even before the absurdists, Gombrowicz exposed all the absurdities in society and then, above all, the compulsory categories imposed by religion, power and other conventions. The bourgeoisie, gender, friendship, love, fathers and sons, the macho man and the sensitive woman, ‘the ordinary people’, but also the writer and his subject and the little dramas of daily life and awkward situations: all these are dissected as dynamics, relationships and privileges which occur between people and as a result of their behaviour, language and appearance.

Form

To describe Gombrowicz’ poetics is to try and understand those of Tibaldus and vice versa. In 2016 Tibaldus brought Yvonne, prinses van Bourgondië (Yvonne, Burgundy Princess) back to life, and this year Het Huwelijk (The Marriage). The difference may lie in the fact that Gombrowicz theatralized daily life and its social relationships, whereas you might say that Tibaldus uses – or rather, manipulates - the form of the theatre to create an authentic and contemporary presence. One dismantles the artificial relationships of class, family and gender in society, the other looks to deploy form almost paradoxically and deconstruct it so as to ‘be’ on stage. So form is central to Gombrowicz’ work and the way Tibaldus approaches it.

So what exactly is form for Gombrowicz? It really goes back to the basis of the theatre as a medium and to the way we shape – give form to - ourselves as individuals in a community, whether that is in a particular job, family or on social media. With Gombrowicz and also Tibaldus’ productions a person becomes the father by calling him that, or someone becomes king by kneeling before him. Or think of etiquette as a way of distinguishing oneself. These acts go back to the essence of how the concept of ‘performance’ is understood in (linguistic) philosophy. Judith Butler teaches us how gender and norms are performative. In actions, vocabularies, positions, movements, costumes, life choices, etc. we perform our identity. So in other words, there is no such thing as an a priori, finite identity, but rather we shape it through our acts, thoughts and social behaviour. As Gombrowicz himself said: artificiality is inborn – and you might add that you fall from one artificiality into another.

The game with the reality-creating power of words also shows what the power of statements is, particularly when they come from positions of power (someone is important, so what he says takes on more importance). Truth increasingly loses out in a world of performative statements. That is the danger of form today, in a divided society and a media landscape in which performative statements drown out the truth. Every group has its opinion, to the point that there can be no more communication, and two people stand shouting and gesticulating at each other without understanding a single word of what is being said.   

Many performative aspects of identity and social dynamics converge in the traditional marriage, which establishes the man as the head of the family and father, the woman as the mother and submissive housewife. A marriage is also a class matter: ideally marry ‘well’ with someone from ‘a good family’. As in many repertoire plays, it seems you do best to marry within your own class and that ‘aiming higher or lower’ or setting your sights on a strange partner, invariably leads to problems. Also as a performative act, marriage is an important case. What happens when a mayor or alderman joins a couple in matrimony? A mere word changes the status of that couple, not only legally, but also emotionally, sometimes religiously, and also within a group of friends and family. They are still the same two people, at least on the outside, but they are no longer the same at all. Words change the reality and, to draw a parallel with the performing arts, they activate our imagination of a reality. So it is with good reason that a marriage is at the centre of both Yvonne, prinses van Bourgondië and Het Huwelijk and that it becomes the engine of a breakdown.

 

From Yvonne to Het Huwelijk

With Tibaldus we see this same effect of language, which creates not only realities, but also shapes our thoughts and, in so doing, restricts what we can express. Taking the floor is an active deed which has an impact. Words present a struggle, they are manipulated. The artificiality of language as a corset we put on each time we say something, translates into the actor who relates to the script and the character that script creates time and time again. In Yvonne that translation ran on into almost manic compulsive gesticulation - a word, a gesture – the language becomes physical and thus forms bodies and relationships between bodies. The prince, a young man, an adolescent, has not yet acquired a fixed ‘form’. He is still fanciful and playful, though his origins have already moulded his life. When he asks Yvonne, a poor and very ugly girl who barely utters a word, to marry him, he breaks the conventions and sends shockwaves through the royal court. A marriage to an outsider without all those empty formalities designed to serve as distinguishing factors, makes it clear that all those forms are actually ridiculous – or why some people are attached to them. Introducing the formless jeopardizes form. The gestures dismantle the language as a ratio, as a form and of course as a means of expression. We don’t say the words, but the words say us. So the characters in Yvonne increasingly become followers of a script, of a score, a choreography.

In Het Huwelijk, music, and the Flemish polyphony in particular, plays the role of dislocating form. Part-song requires constant attention to and a relationship with the other voices, but the absence of a stable time and harmony generates a sort of sliding freedom. Just as the choreography contains both potentiality and compulsiveness, the music teeters between sacred and free style. The figure of Yvonne is mirrored by that of the drunkard: another example of how someone loses his ‘form’ after innumerable shots of vodka and how the formless challenges form. Only drunks and children tell the truth, the saying goes. In Het Huwelijk it is not so much that the drunk tells the truth, but more that it demonstrates the truth of the other characters.

The playfulness of Yvonne, which was written by Gombrowicz in 1935 when he was still a young man, is followed in his second play with a more unpleasant form. The form as hallucination, as trauma, as a bad dream. Whereas Yvonne ended with the death of the title character, Het Huwelijk begins with it. This links the two plays. Tibaldus has some of the characters make a comeback so that it feels like a sequel.  

Gombrowicz wrote The Marriage in 1948, with the experiences of exile and the Second World War fresh in his mind. That real, unnerving event stemmed from a dehumanizing, destructive form: Fascism, Nazism and the grim logic of a bomb that had to be invented and tested. In the play a man returns from the war and nothing is as it seems. Is he dreaming? Is he traumatized? Just as you can’t write anything else after Auschwitz, business as usual, the old form, seems an impossibility. This also seems to be the harsh criticism Gombrowicz is making in this play: violence and the now undeniable absurdity of returning to form, as if nothing has happened. New generation, same cake?    

Yet this omnipresence of form doesn’t lead to a nihilism from which there is no exit. Individuals may be shaped by relationships with others in the immediate vicinity but that doesn’t mean they are empty cartridges. At least, that’s how it feels with the Tibaldus actors. Each one performs in his own way or, in other words, takes on form in his own way and passes it on in his own way. That is also something Butler says, namely that there is a lower limit to the performative, to the extent to which someone can be formed, transformed. There is a fundamental mass, a potentiality, which can surface when we break open the form. If there is no such thing as real formlessness, we can still strive for a freedom with which we can relate to the set of possible forms. As an actor, man becomes an existential question. From man to man, in miniature, we can begin on new relationships every day.

 

Stage  

Both Yvonne and The Marriage use the stage as a medium, a place where identities, characters, relationships, feelings and dynamics are constantly played out. In the theatre the status of what we see and hear is always double. It always refers both to something we don’t really see on stage and to how a relationship, a personality comes into existence and is dissolved again in the here and now. Where does the character begin and where does the actor stop? Tibaldus plays with that ambiguity drawing on its great love of the theatre medium. Whereas Gombrowicz started from the language and the text – however performative it might be – the acting and the stage are the fundamentals for Tibaldus.

The members of Tibaldus, like Gombrowicz for that matter, prefer to talk about stage rather than theatre. As if stage focuses more on the acting, on what happens between the actors. Stage seems more human in dimension than theatre, which immediately brings to mind an art form and an institute, a building. What happens on stage is the personal: pretending, taking the floor, a gesture, a (wrong) note. In Yvonne, prinses van Bourgondië (2016) that stage was a circle, an arena. A form which immediately triggers a dynamic of performance and strife but also of concentration and ritual. The stage as a sacred place: not as a sacred house, but as a place of exceptions and transformations.     

Those transformations are not revolutions and system changes but minor occurrences. They are seemingly chance attachments; in the case of Yvonne, they are the personal development of the prince who asks her to marry him. In Het Huwelijk a young man again creates a world of his own in which he becomes entangled. But a small transformation is also the continuous search to make and perform theatre. The production as a rehearsal, a repetition in which everything always seems possible, without everything assuming a fixed form.  In Het Huwelijk the circle makes way for the picture frame stage. How can you act here on a human scale? Here, too, Gombrowicz provides the tools which Tibaldus changes to suit its own practice: the rules of the game of the bourgeois theatre crumble, the ‘well-made play’ and the empathizing actor make way for the pleasure of performing together, for the free performance with personalities and characters, between stage and tribune, in word and melody, motionlessness and movement.  

Gombrowicz’ diary entry at the beginning of this article finishes with the following thought: “If I can never be entirely myself, the only thing that allows me to save my personality from annihilation is my will to authenticity, the stubborn-in-spite-of-everything ‘I want to be myself,’ which is nothing more than a tragic and hopeless revolt against deformation.”

Hence his need for performance: performing so as not to be performed and performing so as not to ossify. In the hands of Tibaldus, that desire to be yourself is a quest to become permanent. “Play must be serious to be play!” (Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens).

 

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