With 'SCAPEGOAT', Ferenc Balcaen, who graduated from the Drama and Directing programme at RITCS two years ago, presents his first professional work at the KVS.
Ferenc Balcaen is one of Belgium's most promising theatre-makers
Who is Ferenc Balcaen
Age: 27
Studied Art History at UGent and Drama and Directing at RITCS
Lives in Ghent
His very recent but acclaimed work directly engages with Hieronymus Bosch and Dante Alighieri
Combines a sound knowledge of art history with a love of music and a nose for punishing images
Instagram ferencbalcaen
Ferenc Balcaen only graduated from the Drama and Directing programme at RITCS two years ago but already, he is considered one of our most promising young theatre-makers. He has collaborated on a number of creations such as the opera Cambio madre by Aïda Gabriëls and Frank Nuyts, or the Julius Eastman tribute Joy Boy by Collectif Faire-Part and S.E.M Ensemble, but it is his own work that is particularly convincing, limited as it is. His master’s thesis Tristis was performed at the KVS. He is now back there as a guest with his first own professional work SCAPEGOAT, which he made together with Muziektheater Transparant.
Balcaen’s inspiration for Tristis was the painting The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch whereas for SCAPEGOAT, he immerses himself in a world inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy. As a queer person, Balcaen wants to confront the symbols of the Christian canon of art and use them to find his own perspective. He takes his ideas from visual art, painting, and cinema, and then uses simple interventions to create a powerful visual universe on stage. He is also well-versed in music: the score of SCAPEGOAT, which pairs Franz Liszt’s Dante Sonata with Gregorian chants and chilling vocals, is at least as poignant as the text. Balcaen’s theory is based on Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty, which seeks out the extremes to expose man’s darker urges.
The black sheep, or scapegoats, from the title are human figures wandering around like faceless dolls in a sterile setting – a cross between a desolate landscape, an SM basement, and a glass showcase. Balcaen’s definition of a scapegoat as an individual or group that the mob considers too progressive and so is excluded so as to cleanse society of its disruptive presence comes from French-American philosopher René Girard. Whoever deviates is dehumanised, and from then on, there is no limit on how much lust and violence can be unleashed on the scapegoat.
“SCAPEGOAT started from the question of how violence and eroticism are depicted in literature and visual art,” Balcaen says. Arriving at Dante’s inferno, he focused on the circle of hell in which blasphemers and homosexuals are punished. Here, his fascination is with the urge to punish with violence, which creates “a vicious circle of pain”, where the pain is “given a poetic translation”, seducing the voyeur in all of us.
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