A masterpiece on war from FC Bergman: “Guernica Guernica”

Waiting for "Guernica Guernica" (20 September 2025, Jahrhunderthalle - Bochum)

Can war be depicted on stage? The performing arts certainly find a thousand and one ways to tell a story, but can they convey the horrors and devastation of war and the sociology and psychology of the victors and losers without being didactic, informative or descriptive? FC Bergman, the Belgian theatre collective whose work I have followed for many years, successfully answered this question with their wordless performance Guernica Guernica, which premiered in the Bochum Jahrhunderthalle from 19 to 21 September 2025, during the final week of the 2025 Ruhrtriennale, directed by Belgian director Ivo van Hove. I will now attempt to explain how they achieved this through my impressions of the performance. 

FC Bergman chose to depict the war using the Guernica incident. It's easy to understand why. Guernica is the name of a Basque town in Spain where a state bombed its own civilian population for the first time in modern history. It is also the name of one of the most influential and popular paintings in art history, created by Pablo Picasso, one of the world's most renowned artists, who was inspired by the incident. The reason 'Guernica' appears twice in the show's title is to reference both events.

The 80-minute show, staged on an 8-meter-by-40-meter corridor-type playing area, with audience stands positioned on opposite sides and two large overhead screens facing facing in opposite directions, consists of a prologue and three acts. In the prologue, we follow the brief story told by two male actors who, after the lights go down, emerge from behind the stage into a hidden valley in the middle of the landscape, which is a blue fabric covering the entire playing area, and whose images are projected onto screens from a camera directly overhead. The men first undress and then perform naked while the words 'Somewhere East of Eden' appear on the screens. One of the men holds a bundle of straw and the other holds a statue of a calf; they place these in front of them as if making an offering. Smoke rises from the calf, but the straw remains intact. The man with the straw looks up with questioning, searching and increasingly angry eyes. He then picks up a stone and hits the other man on the head, killing him. This is the story of Cain and Abel. It is God to whom Cain looks up, first as if seeking an answer, then angrily. Thus, FC Bergman presents us with a five-minute performance depicting the first murder in human history.

Immediately after this scene ends, Cain emerges. At that moment, several stage technicians (costume and make-up assistants) appear from behind the scenes and, for reasons that are unclear at the time, begin dressing Abel in rags and applying pale make-up. Meanwhile, a blue sheet is pulled back from two sides, revealing what is underneath. Once the make-up and dressing are complete, the sheets are removed and we are presented with a frozen, black-and-white representation of the moment several bombs hit a crowded area. The date and location are displayed on the ceiling screens: Guernica, 26 April 1937. The scene shows people who are wounded, upturned and dismembered, as well as a horse and a bull. Stones are thrown from the ground and blood spurts from it. All of these things remain frozen in place. Numerous iron bars of varying heights, driven into the floor, hold the bodies, severed limbs, thrown stones and blood in place or suspended in the air. Abel, from 3500 BC, has become a native of Guernica in 1937 and is now part of this disturbingly impressive landscape of horror.

After being given time to take in the spectacle as a whole, the audience watches as a drone takes off from the open side of the stage. It shows close-ups of the people within the landscape on screens, focusing especially on their faces. This is much like watching modern-day wars live on television or on smartphones. Thanks to the close-up shots, we witness the effort, difficulty and pain that the performers experience as they twitch involuntarily in an attempt to keep their facial expressions frozen. The horror of the attack is etched on their faces, especially around their mouths and eyes. This choice of scene metalogically 'shows that the performance is being performed', while, by stretching that frozen moment, it reveals the state of people who would have died if it had continued and the pain they experienced in that thousandth of a second of movement. Using a drone to capture these close-up images is practical because its small size allows it to fit into the intricate 'tableau vivant', but it also reminds me of the role of drones in modern wars such as the war in Ukraine. Once again, I got goosebumps.

Once the drone had finished filming and returned to its original position, the stage crew rose suddenly from their stations and headed backstage through the open area. At the same time, stage technicians entered the arena from all directions, pushing dollies and beginning to dismantle the iron bars and other fixed props. Meanwhile, in the backstage area, 80 extras could be seen changing their clothes and makeup and preparing for the next scene. We had passed through this area to reach our seats in the stands before the show began and had seen it prepared in a manner similar to Ariane Mnouchkine's approach.

Once everything had been dismantled and removed from the arena, the props for the second scene were brought in: long banquet tables covered with drinks and flowers. Only one prop from the previous scene remained and was used in this scene as well: a black bull statue, which had been upturned by the impact of the bomb. During the scene change, the bull was rotated and placed in the centre of the banquet tables.

Unlike the previous scene, this time we were presented with a scene in color, particularly warm tones. The screens displayed a date approximately three months after the bombing of Guernica, and below it, a message celebrating the 50th birthday of General Emilio Mola, who ordered the bombing. During the party, where Spanish soldiers, the German Nazi pilots who bombed Guernica, elegantly dressed upper-middle-class ladies and gentlemen, nuns, and priests were having a good time, where champagne was poured excessively and a piñata in the shape of Lenin's head was smashed with a stick, a photographer took photos of the guests which were instantly displayed in black and white on the screens above.

Once again, FC Bergman presented us with an epic sense of grandeur while simultaneously showing us close-ups. These close-ups revealed not only the unease, hypocrisy and banality beneath the surface fun, but also echoed the close-ups in the previous scene.

One example is when a girl ran around the festivities with a toy bomb and held a lit candle under the hand of a girl with Down's syndrome under the banquet table. Perhaps the most disturbing moment in the show was being confronted directly with the essence of humanity ingrained in our genes through childlike brutality.

An example of the latter is the images of gaping mouths in the previous scene, just before death, and the images of hearty laughter in this scene.

These images show us that a similar image can have different meanings; that laughter exists thanks to those who suffer; and that wherever there is laughter, it is inevitably paid for by the suffering of others. 

The second part concluded with the lone girl, who had left the stage in a procession, popping the balloons, colored like the Spanish flag, that had previously fallen from the ceiling. The third and final section showed us a giant transparent painting surface (3 metres high and 8 metres wide) mounted on one of the short ends of the playing area and slowly moving towards the other end. Inside, an actor portraying Picasso first wandered around his studio looking for inspiration for a painting. He then read about the Guernica incident in the newspaper, put a recording of Ravel's Boléro on his turntable, started playing it, and then used large brushes to paint Guernica on the transparent canvas with white paint. Meanwhile, on the outside, the remaining area of the playing field filled with an increasingly colourful crowd of museum visitors as the painting progressed. The ceiling screens displayed footage of people in the crowd gazing at the painting being created, one after another, from their perspective. Thus, we witnessed both the process of a work of art being created and the potential power of imagination inherent in every human being, as we observed visitors admiring, scrutinising and intently studying a painting that was not yet finished. However, I believe the most striking aspect of this section was the question posed to those admiring the painting: 'Do they really see what they are looking at?' If an anti-war painting created in 1937 had truly been influential, would other massacres have occurred around the world? It may be utopian to expect art to be powerful enough to stop or prevent them, but watching this scene, I can't help but question why humanity remains silent in the face of the massacres, genocides and atrocities taking place in so many corners of the world today, such as in Gaza and Ukraine.

When the massive transparent painting reaches the other side of the playing field, enormous, ceiling-high blue curtains are draped on either side of it. Some of the museum visitors are still looking in that direction. Then, as they slowly leave the playing field, the dozens of iron bars that the stage technicians had previously put together to hold the corpses aloft in the first scene of the show become visible. Perhaps because the inner core of humanity remains silent, or perhaps because it is still there, the world is sadly ready for the next war, massacre and brutality; the foundation remains eternal.

FC Bergman added a number of small details to the show that we wouldn't have noticed while watching it, but which we picked up on after reading the programme brochure. For instance, the birthday party in the second scene never actually took place, as General Mola had died a few weeks earlier. The general is paraded around the party in his military uniform on a toy plane, and it transpires that this scene alludes to the general's real-life death in a plane crash. Another detail is that the reproduction of Picasso's Guernica hanging in the United Nations conference hall is covered by a curtain in the same shade of blue used in the show during the press conference announcing the invasion of Iraq.

Applauding "Guernica Guernica" (20 September 2025, Jahrhunderthalle - Bochum)

In summary, FC Bergman presents three war-related situations in Guernica Guernica: the horrific pain of war; the eerie backdrop of war; and the fascination evoked by its depiction in art. These situations are presented formally as follows: the first is in black and white; the second is in warm yellow and red; and the third is in vibrant colours. The first lacks movement; the second possesses a chaotic dynamic; and the third exhibits a calm, one-way movement.

'Guernica Guernica' presents us with three human positions in relation to war: victim, perpetrator and spectator. However, 'Guernica Guernica' does not allow us to remain comfortable as spectators. The show conceals neither the backstage area, the stagehands nor the stage mechanics; everything is out in the open before the audience's eyes. Representation and its enactment are intertwined. In Guernica Guernica, the art of performance is stripped of its illusion, magic and artificiality. Thus, the FC Bergman team prevents us from becoming immersed in the beauty of these three extraordinary scenes, keeping our gaze sharp and our awareness of every moment of the show.

Just as Picasso's anti-war painting Guernica is a masterpiece, FC Bergman's Guernica Guernica is a rarely seen example of performance art about war — perhaps it is a masterpiece too. The production of this work is due not only to the theater collective itself, consisting of Stef Aerts, Joé Agemans, Thomas Verstraeten, and Marie Vinck, but also to their collaborations with costume designer An D'Huys, lighting designer Bart van Merode, 80 extras, and an unknown number of stage technicians. I congratulate them all on their hard work and dedication with my sincere admiration!

Leaving "Guernica Guernica" (20 September 2025, Jahrhunderthalle - Bochum)

Q & A with Stef Aerts and Thomas Verstraeten after the show (20 September 2025, Jahrhunderthalle - Bochum)

All photographs and videos in the article belong to Mehmet Kerem Özel.

The original version of this article in Turkish was published in Tiyatro Drrgisi.