Timeau, you direct and don’t appear on stage any more. Yet you regard Tibaldus’ productions as collective work. How do you explain that?  

Timeau De Keyser: “We find working collectively a good model. It’s about shared responsibility. How we look at actors on a stage always starts from the personality of the actor. It is not that we have an idea ready in our head and then go looking for someone to execute that idea. On our first rehearsal day, for example, there is still no working text, but the play is on the table in its entirety. The casting is decided there and then and our ideas are fleshed out by talking, thinking and working together. The fact is, we don’t want to be tied by direction concepts and dramaturgies because that way you keep a reality out of your work. It is good if your work can originate from the reality of a specific person who embodies a specific text. For example, it is not only about Hans as the king on stage, but also about how he plays the king.”  

Hans Mortelmans: “Showing an area of tension between an actor and how he interprets his role is an important element in our work. To me it’s very special when actors are aware of that dual element and also acknowledge it.”

Timeau: “As an actor you relate to theatrical concepts, but they are also the concepts we use to organize our day-to-day world. If, for example, in Yvonne we suppose that a chair denotes the disorder in the world, that does actually become the case. A sort of contract is established with the spectator. We decided that the chair is the disorder in the world and nobody in the audience will argue with that. There are constructed codes like that in society too. So theatrality is a tool to talk about those codes.”

Witold Gombrowicz is not an author who is often staged. You are currently rehearsing Het Huwelijk (The Marriage), your second production of his work. Why do you regard Gombrowicz’ texts as so special?  

Timeau: “The reason why we perform Gombrowicz is because in his work we found a response to the research we have been carrying out for some time. Through his work we have been able to expand our thinking about ‘performance’. The fact is, Gombrowicz always speaks about Form versus ‘not Form’. During his life he was confronted by Catholicism, Fascism and Communism. He saw each of those ideologies as a specific sort of form that structures the world. So he makes a plea for ‘in-betweenness’, the moment between the forms. A revolutionary moment in which things are formless.  Gombrowicz propagated the idea of an eternal transformation, whereby the incomplete should be embraced.”

Hans: “I think it was that idea that prompted him to write plays. An act in a play is by definition in that in-between space, between two forms. On the stage I am Hans, but I am also a king. It is more about ‘becoming’ than ‘being’. It is about constantly questioning forms.  Theatre a good medium to do this.”

Yvonne was staged by tg STAN as a graduation piece in 1989. Comparisons between you and STAN are often made. How do you feel about that?

Hans: “What we share with companies like STAN and De Koe, I think, is a sort of love of ‘the rehearsal’ in which something that is fully ‘finished’ doesn’t exist.”

Timeau: “Our actors embody a script very directly. They really get their teeth into it. And every actor relates differently to the text. We are often criticized because of the difference in acting style between our actors.  But we don’t want to create a stereotype. That friction in acting style is not what interests us.”

Hans: “I think that lots of people see that as unfinished. But it’s the unfinished that I find so extraordinary, like a watercolour by William Turner for example.”

You have already created some ten productions. Before that your work was very expressive with little text. In Yvonne the script takes precedence and the space is almost completely devoid of formal elements. Why that shift?  

Timeau: “Because we no longer want to portray the human being lost in a gigantic world. We now want the human being to be the point of departure for the world. In Paard: een opera (Horse, an opera) there was an enormous horse which we lit aesthetically. When we sat looking at the group of actors around it, we suddenly realized that the way the actors were performing the action was more interesting and more real than the large image we had made. So we abandoned those bombastic sets we had worked with up till then.”  

Less repertoire has been performed in Flanders in recent years. Is that a trend you understand?  

Hans: “Not really. I love repertoire, whereas the word has gone into decline. I still like reading repertoire texts. We also toy with the idea of reading a play together every evening.”

Timeau: “We would like to make a point of reading repertoire because we think that our generation only knows a very limited number of interesting works. Personally I love tradition because I think you can draw so much of value from it. The theatre tradition is really about the history of man who encodes the world. So I don’t understand how you can try and speak seriously about the world without being interested in that tradition. To make good work, you need to know how for thousands of years people have related to the world by means of codes.

Lastly, I would like to ask you about Tibaldus’ logo, the little black horse. What is the meaning of the horse?  

Timeau: “In every production there is a horse figure. It is the unnameable and unknowable that arrives in an already formed and structured community. A sort of black cat around which all form moves and at a certain point has form fall apart. It really began when we were looking to manifest death in Paard: de musical. We chose to have a horse fall out of the air and that’s how that idea came about. In every production it’s a bit different. In Persona, for example, it was the person who is silent and in Yvonne it is Yvonne herself whose passivity causes uproar in the court. We don’t declare this in every production. Sometimes we keep it hidden and we don’t express it formally because we are afraid it might become a gimmick. Simon once drew the logo in paint.”     

Hans: “With the thick paintbrush!”

Timeau: “And it’s made up of just five pixels.’

Hans: “Seven at the most!”

(both laugh)

Interview by Dina Dooreman

 

← Back to overview