Belgian theater group FC Bergman He was still young when he received an invitation to the famous festival in the city of Antwerp in 2011.
Troupe members graduating from acting school were excited, except they didn’t have the money or the time.Yet in just one month they sprawled “300 L x 50 L x 30 L” An ambitious hybrid of theater, installation and live video, it features an elaborate set that recreates a rural hamlet on stage.
“Since it was Christmas time, we decided to remove the Christmas trees from the street and create this forest behind the theater,” another member, Thomas Verstraeten, said in the same Zoom conversation. “It was a pretty crazy experience, actually. We invited our friends on stage, but we also invited our parents, our tech dads,” he continued. “Marie’s old babysitter was there. It was just one time, so she said, ‘Okay, let’s do it for free.'”
It turns out that Shaw has legs, even though her pregnancy was cut short.toured Europe and this month Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music It will be FC Bergmann’s US debut.
BAM’s Artistic Director David Binder said in a phone interview that the show was “funny, thought-provoking, inspired by biblical sources, but 100% modern.” “On the one hand, it’s pushing the boundaries, and on the other hand, it has some level of accessibility for everyone.” Well, not everyone. Binder quickly added that the night was not suitable for children.
The cryptic title refers to the dimensions of Noah’s Ark as described in the Bible, and the scale is appropriately awe-inspiring: ‘300 el x 50 el x 30 el’ spotted by New York spectators The village will house a cast of 15 people. , complemented by numerous locally hired extras, live pigeons and of course the woods. “Actually, this is him one of our smaller shows,” said Stef Aerts, another company member, with a laugh.
Aerts, 34, Verstreten, 36, and Vink, 39, were speaking from Stockholm just before the 2021 production of Song of the Sheep. Home of the Belgian theater company namesake, Ingmar his Bergman. (The person who didn’t answer the call was Joé Agemans, also a member of the collective, who was 40 years old. His two other founding members he left in 2018.) Regularly visiting Europe’s finest houses and festivals, he has been a resident of his company in Antwerp since 2013. Municipal Theater, Tonnerhaus. The group no longer has to scavenge for discarded merchandise for the set, giving them extra time to incubate new concepts.
In fact, FC Bergman has worked on existing works, such as adaptations of William Gaddis’s novel JR and Bizet’s opera Pecheur de Perl, but conceives of its own, usually wordless works. there isfor “Nodo no Kuni” (2015) set up a show inspired by the films of Jean-Luc Godard and the Flemish masters in a custom-made, full-scale replica of the Rubens Room in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Antwerp, Belgium, gathering comparisons with physicality. I was. Transcendence in the work of European superstars like Romeo Castellucci and Pina Bausch.
“300 L x 50 L x 30 L” is a theater company that expresses the aesthetics of the Scandinavian crime series that was popular in the early 2010s. “It was also during this period that I discovered the work of the great Swedish filmmaker Roy Anderson, who had a really big influence” on religion and much of the Flemish visual arts. ”
Relatively little is done in this production in full view of an audience watching progress via a live video feed. “It’s about people who are very isolated in small communities. They live in villages, but they don’t interact with each other, only with small houses and small families,” Artz said. I think this feeling is conveyed to the audience by using .I was just shown a wall of a house that was locked, but you can peek through the keyhole.”
This gives viewers more room to superimpose their own stories and interpretations onto the visuals. “We played in Greece during the euro crisis, and I felt that people saw the show as some kind of metaphor for their situation,” he said Verstraeten. “Now it’s going to be something else. I love the idea that meaning is something that changes all the time.”
The three companies emphasize that there is no right or wrong way to read programs.
“I want the audience to be very open and not have the urge to analyze it or find the key or crack the code,” Ertz said. You have to let the performance flow over your body.”