To boldly go where no one has gone before

Crew long ago turned its back on traditional ways of presenting and experiencing theatre. Terra Nova takes the visitor, body and soul, on an expedition into unknown territory.

Stef De Paepe has already travelled a long way with the Crew company, which is known for its radical application of technology in the theatre. He is joint director with Eric Joris of Terra Nova, on which the writer Peter Verhelst also collaborated. The starting point is the story of Robert F Scott, the British explorer who was beaten in the race to be the first to reach the South Pole by his Norwegian rival Roald Amundsen.
Stef De Paepe: “It is a tragic story. Scott’s preparations were not perfect, but above all he had to contend with dreadful conditions that forced him to make a detour. On his way back Scott died eleven miles from his base camp. In temperatures of minus 40 and minus 50, however, he wrote letters that maybe, in terms of posthumous fame, gave him victory in the race against Amundsen after all.”
Peter Verhelst retells the story. In the first part of the piece, Robby Cleiren and Jorre Vandenbussche narrate the tale; despite the use of headphones with a soundscape, this part is quite traditional. After that, the 55 spectators are divided into five groups and sent to the “immersion room” where Scott’s story is expanded to look at themes with religious, neurological, and existential implications such as ambition, the “self”, free will, and life and death.

Goggles

De Paepe: “Peter Verhelst had made us aware of the resemblance between the map of the South Pole and the morphology of our brains. We place those two worlds alongside each other. The expedition to Terra Nova is also an expedition to unknown territory in our brains. The neurosurgeon Dirk De Ridder of the Antwerp University Hospital even allowed Eric to undergo electromagnetic stimulation of his brains whereby he completely lost all control over his body. That raises questions about the status of what we usually call our ‘self’ and those questions also apply to the media and technology we use to conjure up a virtual world in this production. Audience members wear a costume and goggles that make them actually step inside someone else’s life. The ‘immersants’ receive images and sounds and are constantly stimulated from outside by specially trained assistants.”
Another part of the show involves looking at those “immersants” as they stray through the landscape like lost polar explorers, so that the production not only has literary, theatrical, musical, and cinematic aspects, but can also be seen as visual art in itself.

Terra Nova
17 > 19/2 • 17/2: 19.00 (NL) + 21.30 (NL), 18/2: 19.00 (NL) + 21.30 (FR), 19/2: 15.00 (NL) + 19.00 (EN), €10/12
Kaaitheater square Sainctelettesquare 20, Brussel/Bruxelles,
02-201.59.59, tickets@kaaitheater.be, www.kaaitheater.be