Fear and loathing in Brussels

The choreographer, director, and visual artist Gisèle Vienne is bringing Jerk and This Is How You Will Disappear to Brussels, two shows about crime that raise questions about fear and about our perceptions.

Based in Paris, but with both French and Austrian roots, Gisèle Vienne has created a very varied body of work. Although she is trained in puppetry, you are just as likely to be come across her in an art gallery or a theatre. Her world – whether in live shows, exhibitions, or installations – presents a disquieting strangeness involving dreams and fantasies, often drawing on “punk” texts by Dennis Cooper. At the Kaaitheater she will present This Is How You Will Disappear, in which, amid ultra-naturalist sets depicting a real twilight forest, the audience is introduced to a strange trio: an athlete, her trainer, and a rock star! A show of sophisticated beauty that appeals to the senses, on the frontiers of the genres of theatre, dance, and installation. Poles apart from that finely wrought work with its minimal text, Jerk, to be seen at the Beursschouwburg, is a work whose theatricality is crude and simple, but with a luxuriant text. Sitting on a chair, a psychopath sets out to recount – with the help of a puppet in each hand – the serial crimes in which he has taken part. The work is a one-man show starring Jonathan Capdevielle, an outstanding actor, we are told, here on the edge of madness. Crime, forest, rocker, serial killer, a pervasive mist, strange mannequins, electro music, a ventriloquist-actor…Gisèle Vienne is an artist it is impossible to pigeonhole, with a vast range of influences, ranging from Lynch to Goethe and from Tarantino to Caspar David Friedrich.

You come to us with two shows about crime that are very different in form.
Gisèle Vienne: It’s clear that there is a huge difference between the two pieces. Jerk is “minimal”; This Is How You Will Disappear, on the other hand, is epic and Wagnerian. In Jerk, I raise questions about expression. What are the strategies human beings can adopt to express themselves and to achieve a distance from experience? The work plays with the considerable ambiguity between the actor and his character. If a character tries to keep his own character at a distance, he will fail. Likewise an actor who seems to lose the distance from his character (and what he has to tell). There is a striking, disturbing virtuosity there.
And in This is how you will disappear?
Vienne: I wanted to question my own aesthetics. In my previous shows, I moved to and fro between two aesthetics: beauty connected to chaos and beauty connected to extreme order, with manic direction. I wanted to bring the two together. In the end, the main character in the piece is a trainer who is going through an existential crisis and who brings into the forest a gymnast whose ideals of beauty are meticulousness and technical prowess. In the forest he will discover some extremely wild impulses as he meets an imperfectly beautiful and decadent rock star (akin to Werther or Kurt Cobain). These are contemporary archetypes presented via an initiatory quest in a forest.

Read the full article in AGENDA, page 10-11.
(Photos © Seldon Hunt)

Gisèle Vienne
Jerk: 7/2 • 20.30, €8,50/10/12 beursschouwburg A. Ortsstraat 20-28, Brussel/Bruxelles, www.beursschouwburg.be & This Is How You Will Disappear: 9 & 10/2 • 20.30, €12/16 Kaaitheater square Sainctelettesquare 20, Brussel/Bruxelles, www.kaaitheater.be