Pieter Ampe: choreography as a relationship

(Jake & Pete’s Big Reconciliation Attempt for the Disputes from the Past © Phile Deprez)

The Brussels choreographer and dancer Pieter Ampe has two shows running at the Kaaistudios. Both are duets: one with the Portuguese dancer Guilherme Garrido and one with his own brother. In each, Ampe is looking for a pure reflection of his position in relation to the other person, as it is in real life.

In Still Standing You, a duet with Guilherme Garrido, every ambiguous position that can exist in a relationship between two men is played out. In the performance the behaviour of both Pieter Ampe and Garrido, who worked together in 2007 on Still Difficult Duet, ranges from friendly and amiable to sexual to thoroughly aggressive. Are the two friends or enemies? “This is a tense relationship between two individuals, in which challenges keep cropping up,” explains Ampe. “Guilherme is very impulsive, whereas I thrive on slowness and being lost. That is our conflict. Sometimes I can’t spell things out or say what I want, while he drives me crazy with his restlessness. And yet we always link up again, without ever arriving at a compromise. The show is about the beauty of friendship: about how intense relationships can sometimes hurt. About the zest for life too. We confront each other in this work. During the rehearsals it got so rough at times that we were close to injuring each other.”

Learning from each other
In Jake & Pete’s Big Reconciliation Attempt for the Disputes from the Past, the second of the two Kaaistudios shows, Ampe appears with his brother Jakob, a speech therapist who sings with The Germans. As Ampe sees it, “From your family you receive a way of physically relating to people. When you are growing up you adopt gestures; you learn through imitation. We try to go into that in depth in Jake & Pete. It is less confrontational: we look back at what has happened in our lives. We show how we developed along the same lines and where we differ. We learned a lot from each other in the process of working on it. Jakob, for example, gave me voice training, while I explained the right way to stretch. That recurs too. At one stage, for example, we sing a little song, as a present for each other.”

Pieter and Jakob were born in Burundi. Ampe explains: “In the late 1970s my parents went there as volunteers to teach economics and physics. Not long after I was born we moved to Ghent. The idealism of our parents has always obsessed us. We often discussed with Alain Platel, the mentor of this project, how we could develop this into a performance. We ended up with something simple; sketching a subtle picture is more important than black-and-white thinking.”
Ampe has also worked as a dancer. He appeared in productions by, among others, Jan Decorte (Cirque Danton, 2002) and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker (The Song, 2009). “That time with Decorte I had just left secondary school; it was a wonderful experience. Afterwards I wanted to develop further at a school and I went to P.A.R.T.S. Recently I had to choose between dancing, with Rosas among others, and continuing on my own. I have been choreographer in residence for a few years now at Campo Gent. Among other things, I’m developing an approach in which I am involved for a week at a time with someone from a different background – from a painter to a film actress, ten people in all. Those encounters continue the concept I developed with Jakob and Guilherme. The discovery of the other continues to really fascinate me.”

Pieter Ampe: Still Standing You • 15/1, 20.30, €10/12, Jake & Pete’s Big Reconciliation Attempt for the Disputes from the Past • 17 & 18/1, 20.30, €10/12, Kaaistudio’s, Onze-Lieve-Vrouw van Vaakstraat 81 rue Notre-Dame du Sommeil, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-201.59.59, www.kaaitheater.be