How many women are in a woman? - Ne Mobliez Mie by FC Bergman

© Kurt Van der Elst

In most of the works that use film/video in the performing arts, the films are shot live on stage, near or off stage, and broadcast live on screens on stage. In some others, films shot live on stage are used in combination with pre-recorded films. Frank Castorf and Ivo van Hove are two of the most skilful users of film and live transmission as a narrative element in theatre, and they have made it an indispensable part of their work, almost their signature. Alongside directors such as Milo Rau, Thomas Ostermeier, Kornél Mundruczó, Katie Mitchell, the FC Bergman collective, consisting of Stef Aerts, Joé Agemans, Thomas Verstraeten and Marie Vinck, are among those who use this narrative technique in innovative and exciting ways in their oeuvre such as in the pieces 300 el x 50 el x 30 el and JR. 

Since 2013, FC Bergman has been creating pieces at the Toneelhuis (a subsidised theatre company of the City of Antwerp), and in their latest piece Ne Mobliez Mie (Remember Me), which premiered at the 1834 Bourla Theatre between 30 November and 13 December 2023, they use the film element as an indispensable part of the narrative, but in a different way from the above-mentioned methods. Before moving on to the performance, it would be useful to talk about the exhibition, which is the starting point of the show.

The exhibition Ne Mobliez Mie, subtitled "cinematic", took place in the rooms of Gaasbeck Castle from 1 July to 5 November 2023. Born as Marie Peyrat into a simple bourgeois family, the Marquise Arconati Visconti inherited the castle after the early death of her rich and noble husband at the end of the 19th century. The eccentric Marquise decorated the castle, which she donated to the Belgian government on her death exactly one hundred years ago, in the Neo-Renaissance style and had herself photographed in and around the castle dressed as a medieval knight. Inspired by this disguise/identity/transformation of the Marquise and her photographic documentation of it, the FC Bergman collective has built the exhibition around the various identities of an anonymous woman, using moving images as a medium. These wordless short films form the backbone of the show, which lasted about an hour. FC Bergman created wordless situations on stage and placed them between the projections of these short films. The films were projected onto a huge screen that covered the entire proscenium, and the live situations took place behind the screen, at a dreamlike distance.

The relationships which were created between the films and the live situations ensure the continuity of the narrative, which moves back and forth like a ping-pong ball between two different media, film and theatre. In one of the films, for example, the horse that falls to the ground after the decapitation of its owner, a female knight, lies motionless on the stage, embraced by a woman in the sequence that immediately follows; or the man who sweeps the exhibition space with a small cleaning machine in the film enters the stage with his machine from the left, having left the moving image from the same side. 

© Kurt Van der Elst

Incidentally, we discover that this man is actually a woman disguised as a man in a later scene, when the woman removes the mask and the prostheses on her face and body. After all, it is a woman who is at the centre of the narrative on which the films are based. She is Marie Vinck, the only female member of FC Bergman. So, Vinck takes on six different identities in the films: A warrior (a medieval knight), an animal (a jellyfish), a worker (a cleaner), an object of desire (Princess Diana), an object of fear (a sea monster) and an object of faith (a statue of the Virgin Mary).

On the other hand, at the centre of the situations on stage is a box. This box, which I could also call a chest, is the size of a room, made of wood, turns on itself and is only visible from the outside, except for the last scene. The reason I call it a chest is that it seems to contain a mystery because it does not reveal or show its interior throughout the show. It is as if the chest symbolises the woman, because in some scenes the body parts coming out of the holes are those of the woman, and when the door is opened, only the woman enters and exits. 

In Ne Mobliez Mie, neither in the films nor on stage, there is not only a woman, but also men. Especially in the situations that take place on stage, we witness men coming to terms with the woman, this mysterious chest. Men of different ages climb on it, crawl on it, lean on it, hang on to it when it swings, hold on to it, lean against it, clap on it, try to solve it, are satisfied with the pieces that come out of it (a hand caressing the man's head, two arms wrapped around the man's body), cannot fully understand it, urinate on it when they cannot find out what it is...

How many women live in a woman's dreams, in her reality, in her previous and subsequent lives? How many lives does a woman live? Is a woman a mystery that cannot be solved or understood from the outside? How many worlds, how many fictions does she hide inside? How many of these worlds does a woman reveal, how many does she open to the outside? Are these worlds places she escapes from, places that liberate her, or is she trapped in them, hiding? 

What is a woman? Is she a killer or a creator, a worker or a housewife, a nightmare or a desire? Is she as worthless as garbage or is she sacred? How many of these is a woman, all of them?

We see the woman who, after experiencing all these different worlds, identities and personalities, leaves the screen and appears in the centre of the stage in her most basic, unprotected and anonymous form, in her underwear, borrowing a coat and a pair of boots from the two female spectators sitting in the front row, and, after putting them on, running off the stage and into the street next to the theatre building where we are. At the end of her run, she reaches one of Antwerp's tall buildings, climbs to the top, sits for a while on the edge of the building, looks around, feels the wind in her hair, looks at the dog standing not far behind her, then turns and lets herself fall into the void. As the scene behind the screen is illuminated for the last time, we see the chest again, this time its walls gradually opening outwards, until finally its interior is exposed to the outside, revealing the cloud landscape on its inner surfaces. The woman, on the other hand, is high above this cloud landscape, flying peacefully in the air with slow movements.

© Mehmet Kerem Özel

Ne Mobliez Mie is the result of the intertwining of cinema and theatre, not simultaneously but sequentially, one two-dimensional, the other three-dimensional, the first recorded and the second live. FC Bergman has skilfully sewn together the points of contact between these two disciplines, which have completely different rules and techniques, and created a unique form that serves the narrative.

Ne Mobliez Mie, in which the subtle humour and the sadness, the nihilism and the enthusiasm inherent in FC Bergman's oeuvre go hand in hand once again, is an entertaining, fascinating, enigmatic piece which, with its short duration of one hour, lingers on the palate. 

Wait for its world tour and catch it somewhere.