FC Bergman, the collective that tells stories about little people trying to cope with big worlds

La Terra di Nod ( Het Land Nod) by FC Bergman

 Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia © Andrea Avezzù

To experience FC Bergman's Het land nod (The Land of Nod), we are in a gigantic room in one of the art chamber-like museums of fine arts built in Europe in the second half of the 19th century to display the collections of royalty. The room, measuring 18 metres by 12 metres and 10 metres high, was built from scratch in a disused factory in the nearby industrial area of Marghera because it did not fit into any of the existing theatres in Venice. Half of it is used as a tribune for the audience and the other half is used as a stage. Later I learned that this space is not supposed to be a part of an anonymous museum, but it is an exact replica of the Rubens Room of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerpen, which had been closed for four years for renovation in 2015, when this show premiered (and only recently reopened in November 2022).

The first thing that strikes me on entering the room is that the walls are completely empty, except for a single huge painting hanging on the left wall, and for an attendant who is cleaning the floor with a machine. As the show begins, we see four or five attendants removing the painting, which seems as heavy as it is huge, from the wall hooks and taking it to the only door in the room, but they cannot take it out because it is too big to fit through the door. During this scene I realised that the other paintings had been moved, that the hooks on the walls belonged to them, and that only this painting was left.

When I learned that the show was directly inspired by the events that happened to the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerpen, such as the bomb that fell near its walls during the Second World War, or the closure for renovation that I just mentioned, the empty walls and some moments in the following scenes make more sense to me. However, in my opinion, it is not necessary to know this information in order to watch and enjoy the show.

In one of the first scenes, with the explanation from the audio guide around the neck of one of the visitors entering the hall, we learn that the painting is Rubens' Le Coup de Lance - Christ on the Cross, Christ between the two murderers. The content of the painting must have an important place in the layers of meaning of the show, but the fact that a significant proportion of the audience cannot see it properly because it is placed on one of the side walls makes me think that perhaps the content of the painting is not so vital to understanding the show. In fact, the backbone of the 90-minute show is not the content of the painting, but the adventure of the curator who is determined to remove the painting from the room. He is part The Tramp (Charles Chaplin), part Mr. Hulot (Jacques Tati), part Inspector Clouseau (Peter Sellers); lovable but obsessive, incompetent, clumsy and a little stupid; so much so that he hangs from the ladder he climbs while measuring the dimensions of the painting, even partially implements the preposterous solution of cutting the frame of the painting, and finally finds the solution by dynamiting the top of the door of the room in order to raise the gap through which the painting would pass.

Around this increasingly absurd plot, surreal moments take place in the room: a group of three and then six people dance in large semicircles from wall to wall, three of them suddenly disappearing into one of the walls; a man stripping naked, like Jesus in the painting, sits for a long time in front of the painting, leaning against the wall in front of it; a woman is pisses in front of the painting; the flower petals, snowballs and withered leaves are scattered on the floor by the man in the tuxedo who comes to the centre of the stage at regular intervals; people practise prone swimming on the ground; people live in a small tent; one of the skateboards on the wall suddenly turns into a black hole, dragging the blankets on the floor with the man who fell on them a few minutes ago; rain, wind, strong sunlight; plasterboard suddenly falls from the ceiling; grey velvet fabric covering the wall suddenly falls away, separating from the Wall; the sound of bombs; two versions of Summertime, one by a soprano and one by Nina Simone, Max Richter's version of Spring from Vivaldi's Seasons.

La Terra di Nod ( Het Land Nod) by FC Bergman

 Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia © Andrea Avezzù

At the end of the performance, when the curator who had managed to take the painting outside came and sat down with his small table under the wall that the painting had vacated. The silhouette of Jesus in the painting appears on the wall through the light, in the same position as in the painting; Jesus is now a ghost in the hall.

Both the backbone story and all the other scenes were dramaturgically constructed with a meticulously calculated timing; silences, stillness, energetic moments, funny moments, melancholic moments, the use of music, the use of illusions, the design of movement, moments of slapstick and pictorial moments were arranged one after the other with consistency, dosage and balance. Parallel to the action, the gradual transformation of the space from its clean, smooth and solid state to its gradual contamination, decay and damage was also skilfully designed.

La Terra di Nod ( Het Land Nod) by FC Bergman

 Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia © Andrea Avezzù

After I read the description of the show, I learned that there are references to the films of Jean-Luc Godard. In one of the two iconic scenes of the director's famous 1964 film Bande à part (The Gang), the three mates are dancing the Madison style in a café, and in another scene the same trio are running at top speed through the halls of the Louvre Museum when an outside voice says that the Louvre Museum can be visited by an American in 9 min. 45 seconds, and the three decide to do better. I noticed that during the dances in the show, which are performed in semicircles between the walls, the soundtrack of this scene was repeated.

FC Bergman may have taken the Rubens Room of the Museum in Antwerpen as the starting point, but by making such an obvious reference to the Louvre, the mother of all museums, the show may also contain the idea of an anonymous museum. The interpretation of museums as protective containers of human heritage also makes it possible to read the elements of bombs, wind, rain (hurricane) coming from outside throughout the show as threats to humanity in a dystopian future. I could also interpret the blankets spread out on the floor in one scene by identifying them with refugees, homeless people, migrants. It would also not be wrong to describe the museum room at the end of the show as a battlefield. The fact that the silhouette of Jesus, who turns into a ghost at the end of the show, is watching this battlefield is very significant from this point of view...

In researching the name of the show, I learned that the Land of Nod is described in the Bible as the place east of Eden where Cain was banished by God after killing Abel. Could this place, the museum room in which we, the audience, are "in", be Nod, the present-day earth itself, where, according to Jewish religious texts, Cain continued his evil, resorted to violence and robbery, transformed human culture from innocence to cunning and deceit, and built a fortified city?

On the other hand, if we consider the music, the objects (flower petals, snowflakes, dry leaves), the atmospheres (wind, rain, fog, sun) used in the show, could I not also interpret the museum rrom as a geography through which the seasons pass, just like the earth itself?

La Terra di Nod ( Het Land Nod) by FC Bergman

 Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia © Andrea Avezzù

FC Bergman is a collective founded in 2008 by six friends; Stef Aerts, Joé Agemans, Bart Hollanders, Matteo Simoni, Thomas Verstraeten and Marie Vinck, who came together with the aim of doing something different and contrary to the approach of studying traditional acting at the Antwerp Conservatory and acting out texts by classical playwrights such as Shakespeare and Moliere in school plays. As expected, the Bergman in their name comes from the famous Swedish film and theatre director Ingmar Bergman. FC can be read as an abbreviation for Football Club or, as they stated in their first work, Foute Club.

If one of the main characteristics of FC Bergman's shows is that they are set in large and grandiose environments, be it a site-specific space or a theatre stage, and tell the story of small people trying to cope with these large environments, i.e. the world, another is that their narratives are generally textless. In early works, FC Bergman used the Antwerp docks (Terminator Triology, 2012), turned the parterre of Antwerp's famous old theatre Bourla into a swimming pool (About Reynard the Fox, 2013), while JR (2018), one of the works I've seen from them, was set in a four-storey and four-sided tower, and 300 el x 50 el x 30 el (2011) in a village surrounded by pine forests. Although 300 el x 50 el x 30 el and The Sheep Song (2021) were wordless performances, FC Bergman naturally did not hesitate to use text when adapting a 600-page brick novel for the theatre, such as JR (2015) or Freud (2019), which FC Bergman brought to the stage with Ivo van Hove as an International Theatre Amsterdam production.

Since Het land nod's performances at the Festival d’Avignon in 2015, FC Bergman has become one of the most sought-after performing arts companies in the world. Although the collective's shows, which combine many techniques or genres such as dance theatre, illusion/magic, slapstick, acrobatics, live camera shots, immediately bring to mind Pina Bausch, Christoph Marthaler or Romeo Castellucci, they say that their main inspiration comes from film directors and visual artists. They put the three Andersons at the top of their list of cinematic influences: Wes Anderson, Roy Andersson and Paul Thomas Anderson. Indeed, if you mix the atmospheres in the films of these three filmmakers, you can easily imagine the feeling of an FC Bergman show.

Silver Lion’s Ceremony. From the left: Gianni Forte, Director of Theatre Sector (ricci/forte); Roberto Cicutto, President of Biennale di Venezia; Armando Punzo, Golden Lion winner; Stefano Ricci, Director of Theatre Sector (ricci/forte) 

Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia © Andrea Avezzù

Bart Hollanders and Matteo Simoni left the collective two years ago, but were in Venice for the performances of Het land nod, in which they participated both in the design process and as actors. FC Bergman were invited to Venice to receive the Silver Lion Award at the Venice Theatre Biennale. The rationale of ricci/forte, the general artistic directors of the Biennale for awarding FC Bergman with the Silver Lion, which is given to artists such as Samira Elagoz (2022), Kae Tempest (2021), Jetse Batelaan (2019), Anagoor (2018), Maja Kleczewska (2017), Babilonia Teatri (2016), Agrupación Señor Serrano (2015), Fabrice Murgia (2014), Angélica Liddell (2013), Rimini Protokoll (2011), perfectly sums up much that can be said about this unique collective:

“FC Bergman, drawing inspiration from cinema, literature and art history, and blending a painterly aesthetic and the use of highly advanced technology with the great allegorical-Medieval-biblical stories, shape an original language of site-specific-theatre-dance, poetic yet at the same time irreverent, which arouses a feeling of disconcerting apprehension in the viewer. Using references, symbols and images that are deeply rooted in western culture and civilisation, eluding the dictatorship of the vanishing point in Italian-style theatres with perspectives organised as a whirlwind of tableaux vivants and allowing themselves a margin of unpredictability and improvisation, FC Bergman flirts with the limits of feasibility, creating modern apocalyptic tales, often without words but with surprising plastic potency and evocative power, thus focusing on Man – torn between the existential desire to transcend his perimeters and the fear of change – following him in his moving odysseys that metamorphose into tragicomic misadventures.”

FC Bergman receive the Silver Lion 

Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia © Andrea Avezzù

In their speech after receiving the award, the members of FC Bergman mentioned one of the stories told by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan in Italo Calvino's famous book Invisible Cities, about a city that is forever 'under construction': The city is full of scaffolding, beams on beams, pieces of construction. When Marco Polo asked the inhabitants who were building the city "the meaning of their construction" and "whether they had a drawn plan they were following", he was told to wait until the end of the working day for them to show him. After sunset, the work stops, darkness falls and the sky is covered with stars. The townspeople show Marco Polo the sky and say, "Here is our plan.

After this quote, the members of FC Bergman thanked everyone who had helped them build their visible and invisible city over the past 15 years. We, the audience, should also thank them for letting us be a part of their city and their dreams. 

 [The Turkish version of this article was published in unlimited on July, 25th 2023.]