The unbearable loneliness of being the other amongst humans - The Sheep Song by FC Bergman
© Kurt Van der Elst
This is a process in which the male sheep, after slowly standing on two legs among the flock of real sheep on stage, learns not only physically how to walk on two legs, but also spiritually and existentially about lust, pleasure, love, relationship, responsibility, fear, oppression, loneliness and prohibitions through the characters he meets (the demon, anonymous people with hidden faces, dogs, the matador, the puppet and the puppeteer) and the events he experiences.
He experiences many things along the way; He is despised by people who do not see him as one of them, who exclude him, he encounters human traditions that slaughter animals, for example the matador who beheads the bull he has killed, he dances with his lover between the flower fields, He walks King Kong-like on top of skyscrapers with a transparent jar containing the murdered body of his half-human, half-sheep baby, he attends the same therapy group with figures outside the ordinary such as Pinocchio, Kafka's beetle, Michael Jackson and the Tree Man, and he witnesses the slave-master relationship between the puppet and its puppeteer.
© Kurt Van der Elst
It is as if the puppet represents the "common man" and its performer the imperious "male god"; indeed, in the only spoken scene in the show, which is in Italian, the puppet addresses its performer directly as "Dio" (God). The god is in a shabby state; his beard is ragged, one of his eyes is hanging out of its socket, his hair is almost bald and he wears a garment that covers only his shoulders from the waist down, his "bottom" is naked, but he is still able to deprive the common man of lust (erection and ejaculation) and pleasure (smoking).
The performance begins with a naked figure whose face, head and arms are covered by a red veil, while the rest of the body is powdered white: This figure, which can be interpreted as a "demon" because it serves the narrative in the following scenes, but can also be seen as a "narrator" of the almost entirely wordless show, or as a "guide" who leads us through the "tableaux vivants", sneaks into the auditorium through the curtain and pulls the rope at the side of the stage, the bell hanging from the ceiling rings and the curtain opens. As the show progresses, all sharp scene changes are made by ringing the bell; the narrator/demon usually changes the scene, and rarely, if he is in a very tight situation, the sheep will also take the initiative to ring the bell.
© Kurt Van der Elst
There are only two figures in the show, white and naked below the waist: the narrator and the puppeteer. Perhaps they represent the same being; both are gods, one is the old age of the other. Just as the older one dominates the puppet, forbidding, frightening and oppressing it, the younger one makes us, the audience, witness a wider story, almost a medieval morality play, in which this puppet-puppeteer microcosm is also present; It reveals to us the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of being human and, moreover, of being the "other/foreigner" among human beings, by showing us how a sheep, whose mind has been seduced into becoming human by a human beauty, music, achieves its goal, despite all the adversities that befall it, that is, despite having learned to whistle and to play an instrument, finally gives up and "bleats" back to the flock of sheep of which it is a part. The show ends in such a way that the sheep's loneliness is intensified when the flock to which he returns does not accept him back, and we are unable to find a way out.
The sheep and the puppet are a kind of Everyman/Jedermann, the indispensable protagonist of medieval doctrinal plays. It is no coincidence that a sheep was chosen as the protagonist of this show, which ostensibly tells a story about animals; in Christianity, not only is the community interpreted as sheep, Jesus as the shepherd, but also Jesus himself as the sheep sacrificed for humanity.
The fact that the bell is the element that sets the narrative in motion and defines its phases, and that the bell is hung not on the stage but on the ceiling of the auditorium; apart from physically incorporating the space of the audience into the show, it both strengthens the atmosphere of the show and serves the semantic layer of the medieval morality play that I believe is inspired by the reference.
The Sheep Song bears traces of the atmosphere of medieval plays not only in its content but also in its form. The show skilfully combines illusion, puppetry, dance, acrobatics, mime and live music (Frederik Leraoux-Roels/Ruben Machtelinckx play live on stage for almost the entire performance) to create a magical and mysterious atmosphere both on stage and in the auditorium. The use of the curtain, the lighting (Ken Hioco), the fog and a toy-like set that works in harmony with all this, allows this fairy tale to be told in a wonderfully magical way that reminds me of the medieval passion plays with all their stage mechanics, props and costumes that were prepared to convert the audience to religion and impress the believers. When I say stage mechanics, I am referring to the travellators placed along the length of the stage, close to the audience, through which the whole show passes, except the beginning and the end of the show, which can move at different speeds and in different directions, and the two man-sized boxes, which are open on both sides in the direction of these travellators, and closed on the other sides, and which can move back and forth in the direction of the travellators, to allow the entrance and exit of the actors, props and scenery.
© Mehmet Kerem Özel
The FC Bergman collective, founded in 2008 by Stef Aerts, Joé Agemans, Bart Hollanders, Matteo Simoni, Thomas Verstraeten and Marie Vinck, continues with four members after the departure of Hollanders and Simoni in 2018. While the members of the collective and Jonas Vermeulen, as the creators of The Sheep Song, performed in the original version of the show, today all the roles have been taken over by the actors of the Toneelhuis.
The Sheep Song has been invited to the 2022 edition of Het Theater Festival, where shows from the Flemish theatre landscape are selected and exhibited by a jury that changes every year. I saw The Sheep Song for the first time with the original cast in Ghent in September 2022 as part of this festival.
In December 2023, as part of Kaaitheater's Periferik programme, I saw the actors of the Toneelhuis this time in a sold-out performance at the Factorij in Zaventem CC, half an hour by train from Brussels.
Five of the show's six actors portrayed not only the key characters in the story, such as the demon, the puppeteer and the sheep lover, but also characters who only appear once on stage, such as the matador, anonymous people, doctors and nurses undergoing surgery and popular characters waiting for a therapy session, all with great skill and fluency, as if there were a cast of 15-20 behind the scenes. Jonas Vermeulen, who plays the sheep who wants to become a man, works miracles in the sheep costume from the beginning to the end of the 80-minute show, and especially for a long time on prosthetic hoof-shaped feet.
Premièred in May 2021 at the 1834 Bourla Theatre in Antwerp, The Sheep Song was a guest on the official programme of the Avignon Festival that summer and is still in the repertoire of Toneelhuis, where the FC Bergman collective has been present since 2013. The Sheep Song is also one of a select number of cultural events honouring the Belgian Presidency of the Council of the European Union in 2024, and continues to be performed in Antwerp and other Belgian cities, as well as on a world tour from Germany to Australia.
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