Impressions from the online program of Kunstenfestivaldesarts

© Natalia Jabanow

Kunstenfestivaldesarts, which was founded in 1994 by Frie Leysen (one of Belgium's most important cultural figures who unfortunately died last year), focuses on contemporary theater, performance and dance, and also includes cinema and visual arts. The festival takes place in Brussels every year in May. However, especially for this year, an additional week was added to the festival in July. When the program was announced, all of the indoor performances in May would be staged face-to-face and a selection of them would be streamed live online. Due to the course of the pandemic, all the indoor performances in May were canceled and only online streams of live or recorded performances were left in the program. Outdoor shows and visual art exhibitions take place under Covid-19 measures as planned. Thanks to the online program that removes physical borders, I had the opportunity to follow the festival.

Pieces of a Woman

The first of the online streams was Pieces of a Woman, directed by the famous Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó. It was the production of TR Warszawa, one of the famous theaters of Poland. It was premiered in 2018 and was selected among the announced 2020 programs of prestigious organizations such as the Avignon Festival and Ruhrtrieannale, which were canceled due to the pandemic. In Kunstenfestivaldesarts the recorded version of the performance was streamed. 

© Natalia Jabanow

Pieces of a Woman, written by Kata Wéber, Mundruczó's longtime colleague and wife, tells the story of Maja, a young woman who lost her baby just after giving birth with a midwife at home, who mourns in her own way and her coming to terms with her immediate family, her mother, sister and husband, confronting the facts, which develops through the loss of her baby but includes more. The show consists of two parts.

The first 30 minutes is a film which consists of a long take, showing us the nativity scene. The second part, which is about a family dinner six months after the event, takes place on the stage, which lasts about two hours. The environment created both in the movie and on the stage is very realistic, even hyper-realistic. So is the acting. However, both the environment and the acting are as close to the reality as they are sterile and distant. It may not be easy to empathize with the protagonists and the events, also because of the strains and gaps of the story.

The movie with the same name (broadcasts on Netflix), which Mundruczó and Wéber shot through the same starting point, has similarities but also differs as if it was composed like variations on a theme of a music composition. The development of its story may not be dense and deeper than the theater piece, but it is more accessible. For example, the young woman's motivation in the process, the weakness of her husband, who could not cope with the loss of his baby and cheated on the young woman, and his vulgarity versus her mother's strong and cultivated character are more palpable and understandable.

Violences

The second online performance at the festival was the Violences written, directed and played by Léa Drouet. It was staged and streamed live three evenings in a row.

© Cindy Sechet

When the play started, a landscape of sand dunes and colorful plastic building models of different sizes welcomed us. Each building or cluster of sand was illuminated by spotlights placed on tripods. The stage was like a set for children to play. Soon when Drouet started wandering through that landscape as a narrator, she told us the story of her grandmother Mado, a child who had to hide during World War II, and the story of Mawda, a Kurdish girl who was killed recently by a police officer during her journey as a refugee with her family. While Drouet told the stories in a distant and calm tone with the meticulousness and neutrality of a journalist, she portrayed them playing with sand dunes and models but avoiding a realistic representation.

Except for Mado and Mawda, the text do not mention the name of any other persons or places in the story. In this way, the stories become independent from people, places and time, and the questioning of the element of violence, which we can encounter anytime and anywhere, becomes generalized from one-off situations.

Le public (The Audience)

In the field of contemporary performing arts, in the last 20-25 years, it has become common to use live shots made on stage or in its immediate surroundings as part of the dramaturgy and/or aesthetics of the piece. In recent years, among the new generation of theater directors using this technique, the number of those who also direct movies has increased. Milo Rau, Simon Stone and Kornél Mundruczó are the first to come to mind. Argentine theater director Mariano Pensotti also made an effective and succesful entrance to this field with his movie Le public (The Audience), the third online show at the festival.

The main idea of ​​his film, which is a project of his theater group Grupo Marea that he founded with stage designer Mariana Tirantte, musician Diego Vainer and producer Florencia Wasser, is based on the fact that those who attend a theater play on the same evening talk about it in their daily lives the day after. This film was produced by the commision of Kunstenfestivaldesarts and was shot during the pandemic in Brussels in Flemish and French, however there are also its Buenos Aires and Athens versions. 

Mariano Pensotti © Emmanuel Fernandez

Le public begins, shot from a stage perspective, with an empty auditorium slowly filling up with spectators with masks keeping distance from each other. We watch the darkening of the lights, the start of the play, the shadows of the lights from the stage falling on the audience and the applause after the play from the same stage perspective, that is, no images or information about the play on the stage are shared with us.

After we watch the spectators leaving the theater building, six stories which were shot in the logic of short film are lined up one after another. Among them there are intricate stories with highly political and/or social sensitivity like the story of a young woman who made a documentary about the pro-regime torturers who took refuge in Belgium from dictatorship countries visiting her mother because the loss her father who worked in the Congo in the times of the colony, in a sudden traffic accident the day before, or the story of a young man whose mother was a communist and had to leave the country, encountering with his father, who infiltrated communist factions as a police officer years ago and later got married, and spending a Sunday lunch with with his father's wife, child and grandchild, or the story of the ambitious female politician who despite finding the dead body of the charwoman who entered her hotel room for cleaning a few minutes ago and hung herself in the bathroom, negotiating with the president of a group whom she called to her room to take him to her side in a vote in the European Parliament the day after. There are also simple love stories, such as the story of the high-school student who attended the play because of the homework given by his teacher, realizing that he and his close friend fall in love with the same classmate during a short bus ride school from home that last night they went to a party together instead of coming to the play and made love.

A still from the film © Mariano Pensotti

The protagonist of each story talks about the play s/he watched the evening before, making an inference according to her/his current situation. So, we witness how the same theater play is interpreted by its audience with different cultural, economic, social, emotional and political backgrounds and characteristics, and what it means in their daily lives. Thus, we, the audience of the film, learn about the play piece by piece, and even form our own opinion about it from conflicting interpretations of the protagonists of these stories, just like any theater performance being interpreted differently by every person who watches or experiences it.

On one hand Le public is a simple exercise on the reception of an artwork, starting from a simple idea about ​​the essence of the theater. On the other hand it is reminiscent of the quality of Kieslowski cinema in terms of the plainless of its cinematography, editing and acting and especially the screenplay focusing on the psychological depths of protagonits who struggle to come to terms with the situations they are in. To sum up, Le public is a quite mature work that would not be expected from a first feature film.

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[The Turkish version of this article is published in Tiyatro Tiyatro Dergisi]