(Photos: Ivan Put)
Bernard Van Eeghem was a must for the programme to mark the Beursschouwburg’s anniversary year. The idiosyncratic performance artist has, in a sense, fused with the venue where he has performed so many new works over the years. It makes an ideal location for a look back at his life – which is what Van Eeghem offers us in If.
In If, Bernard Van Eeghem is joined onstage once again by Katja Dreyer, who performed with him in the past in Also Doch, Kayak, and Pouce. If is explicitly billed as autobiography, but we won’t be hearing Van Eeghem himself: he dances his life, while Dreyer reads it out.
“If is indeed my life story, written in a series of short little scenes, lasting fifteen seconds and sometimes a little longer,” says Van Eeghem. “It starts before my birth and carries on until ‘after the skeleton’ – to quote the dead poet Karel Jonckheere. Katja reads those scenes, because I can’t talk this time myself. I dance, although you are welcome to put quotation marks around that. It is a mix of movements that emerge out of what I myself feel and everything that ever stuck in my memory from Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Wim Vandekeybus, Pina Bausch, Xavier Le Roy, Jérôme Bel, and everything else that comes up in the world of dance. Hopefully, that forms a nice counterpoint to the basso continuo of the text – the life proceeding through the years. I’m in a circle of light on the stage and there’s music too.”
“I want to present this as if it were my last performance. As if I’m going to say everything that has been important to me. There are statements in it too. But it’s mainly about personal memories and events and people who still haunt my mind and have thus had an influence on me. That kind of personal stuff is always universal too. Birth, love, death: everyone can imagine something there. And after death, I meet everyone again in the fictional hereafter. Between the Greeks, the Romans, Louis XIV, and everyone who has made a mark, towards the destiny of the universe. It all drives on in a crescendo that increasingly wears me out until I reach a sort of climax.
All about Bernard Van Eeghem
Are there periods in your life that get a higher specific gravity than others?
Bernard Van Eeghem: Childhood is important, but you can grasp less. The whole coming-of-age period, from the second half of secondary school on, is especially important. What you mainly remember, of course, are the things you experienced for the first time. The first love, the first big journey, the first film, or the first book you were moved by, the first dead person you saw. After that, things do still happen, but in a sense they are variations on the theme. Although the world around you keeps changing, of course.
In what way is your present life as an artist depicted?
Van Eeghem: That, of course, is kind of messy and varied. I should really concentrate on one thing, for once, instead of on just about everything. But I’m very scatterbrained. I was like that in school too. “Van Eeghem, read on!”, would be shouted at me regularly, while I was looking out the window or drawing. I’m interested in just about everything and I’m very impressionable. I have always been interested in other arts too. Once I started studying architecture, because I had heard that it was the mother of all the arts. I thought: if I study that, then everything is included. I want too much, sure. On the other hand, maybe it is that handicap that is actually my thing.
Aren’t there any milestones in that artistic career?
Van Eeghem: Someone who was important for me is Louise De Neef. There was a time, when, in the “Les Lundis” performance evenings, she brought together artists from every discipline, including Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Jan Decorte, Eric Sleichim, Peter Vermeersch, Ultima Vez, Walter Hus, and a whole load of French-speakers too, including Charlie Degotte and Thierry De Mey. They met up on a Monday in La Balsamine, and that was where and when I first did a really personal performance. About my father, without words. For a quarter of an hour, I was booed, very boisterously, but I kept going and at the end I got thunderous applause. I think it was because it was clear that it was something I had to do. That compelling need is important. I don’t just do this because it is in the subsidy application, but from that inescapable urge to produce.
If
17 & 18/4, 20.30, Beursschouwburg, www.beursschouwburg.be
Bernard Van Eeghem: Childhood is important, but you can grasp less. The whole coming-of-age period, from the second half of secondary school on, is especially important. What you mainly remember, of course, are the things you experienced for the first time. The first love, the first big journey, the first film, or the first book you were moved by, the first dead person you saw. After that, things do still happen, but in a sense they are variations on the theme. Although the world around you keeps changing, of course.
In what way is your present life as an artist depicted?
Van Eeghem: That, of course, is kind of messy and varied. I should really concentrate on one thing, for once, instead of on just about everything. But I’m very scatterbrained. I was like that in school too. “Van Eeghem, read on!”, would be shouted at me regularly, while I was looking out the window or drawing. I’m interested in just about everything and I’m very impressionable. I have always been interested in other arts too. Once I started studying architecture, because I had heard that it was the mother of all the arts. I thought: if I study that, then everything is included. I want too much, sure. On the other hand, maybe it is that handicap that is actually my thing.
Aren’t there any milestones in that artistic career?
Van Eeghem: Someone who was important for me is Louise De Neef. There was a time, when, in the “Les Lundis” performance evenings, she brought together artists from every discipline, including Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Jan Decorte, Eric Sleichim, Peter Vermeersch, Ultima Vez, Walter Hus, and a whole load of French-speakers too, including Charlie Degotte and Thierry De Mey. They met up on a Monday in La Balsamine, and that was where and when I first did a really personal performance. About my father, without words. For a quarter of an hour, I was booed, very boisterously, but I kept going and at the end I got thunderous applause. I think it was because it was clear that it was something I had to do. That compelling need is important. I don’t just do this because it is in the subsidy application, but from that inescapable urge to produce.
If
17 & 18/4, 20.30, Beursschouwburg, www.beursschouwburg.be
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