Conversations (at the End of the World) Kris Verdonck
The theater of Kris Verdonck is a theater of the end, an end that is not a final point but a specific moment of human experience—a moment when speech and action lose their inhibitions.
Five characters filling the time left to them before the end of the world. Kris Verdonck’s show is summed up in its title. People talk and talk to each other; they run, shout, play piano, start conversations, recite poems, argue, dance, embrace, repel, etc. They interrupt each other, change the subject, switch constantly from one thing to another. Wherever they start, we are constantly reminded of the imminence of the end. The particularity of this end is that it does not concern only the figures present on stage but humanity as a whole. It is universal and total. Verdonck’s characters are not awaiting their own deaths, or rather, they are waiting for them simply because all things must end. When the world goes, we go and, strangely enough, it is because of this end that there is still a world. Except that—and this is one of the main things about these “conversations”—this end doesn’t come. It is constantly announced and constantly deferred. It places the men and women confronted with it in a strange situation: that of living indefinitely in a time that is about to be broken off. Because of its imminence, the end becomes an integral part of what is experienced; it becomes immanent: time is identified with what remains. It cannot be measured because it hangs by the coming catastrophe, and yet it is constantly expanding. This is the singular temporality inhabited by our five characters, a time in which nothing can be done or constructed, a time that can only be occupied, until the end comes. This paradoxical time also echoes our situation today, between the catastrophe of World War 2 (proof that the human race might one day disappear) and the catastrophe that has already started, the global ecological catastrophe. This time of the end that never stops coming is our time.
WAYS OF ENDING This is not the first time that Verdonck has represented the end. In 2008, his End presented possible scenarios, recounted by a witness coming and going in a glass cabin along a black parapet stretching across the stage. Bodies drop down from the flies, are
hung and struggle in the air, pull weights that are two heavy for them, walk through fire or cover themselves with earth. This piece represents the now horizontal time of the enumeration of disasters and the arbitrary succession of gestures and actions, a time when anything can happen but in which nothing that happens can close the cycle. In Void (2016) confronted viewers with series of installations involving automata, scenes from a world where man is absent: horns playing themselves, automobile engines sputtering on museum pedestals, a drop hammer jumping and falling on the empty stage, toy-dogs rolling and barking in a circle of white light, etc. In (2003) plunges two bodies into an alien milieu, harnessed to a device that keeps them alive: a man and a woman, fully dressed, are immersed in glass tanks full of water. Standing, eyes wide open, they breathe through the plastic tubes that come out of their mouths like long tentacles. Their breathing and their heartbeats are amplified and played in the room. In fact, Verdonck has never really shown anything other than the end: the end we are wai- ting for, the end that comes for us and the end we survive: the time of the end, the time of catastrophe and the time after. For all their differences, what these times have in common is that they are all, in their way, empty, in suspense. Nothing is happening there, because either the event is still to come, or we are living through it without realizing, or it has already happened. In all these cases, space and time are open, waiting to be filled: a nothingness or white page that will hold back none of what is marked there. The stage is empty and will remain empty, whatever happens. That is the primary principle of Verdonck’s theatre.
A THEATER OF CONSTRAINT That is why this theater can take the form of a play, an installation, a performance or a choreography. Theater, for him, is all about bodies. These can be organic or mechanical, but they are always subjected to constraints that, for each one, delimit a specific regime of possible words and actions. In I/II/III/IIII (2007), four dancers hang from threads that guide and constrain their movement. They are living puppets that accompany and resist the coming and going of the threads, with mechanical strength pitted against organic thread, flesh and muscles. In Heart (2004), a woman hanging from a wire is thrown violently backwards every time she clocks up five hundred heartbeats. As the number of beats adds up she sense the imminence of the next shock—without knowing exactly when it will come—which therefore speeds up her heartbeat and brings it closer. She can only wait for it to happen, brace herself, and try to control her heartbeat. The freedom of these dancers seems slender but is that not precisely because here freedom is the obverse of constraint? The constraint of the end foretold is no less great than that of a wire or a bundle of threads: it both prevents and limits the bodies subjected to it. In both cases, it establishes a framework, that is to say, an emptiness and possibilities. The question raised by Verdonck’s theater is therefore this: how do we exercise what freedom we do have? In other words, what are we to do with the spacetimes that these constraints open up to the bodies that accept them? FREEING VOICES The text of Conversations (at the End of the World)— as we read in author Kristof Van Baarle’s words in the press kit—is a “collage of real conversations and poems from disaster zones and military theaters, from texts about boredom in prison, stories of mad prophets and philosophers, works written by composers at death’s door, etc.” What cannot fail to surprise about this compilation of words and thoughts written or spoken by men and women facing their end is the diversity and heterogeneity of what they say. Freed from the necessity of social exchange and the effect of hierarchical codes, the voices are no longer inhibited: they say whatever comes into their head, they invent, poetize, remember, are afraid, reflect, etc. They are suddenly at one with what they are saying. These “conversations” are ultimately much more than that: they are exercises in liberation. In Gossip (2010), sixteen men and women in suits stand facing the audience and whisper to each other, then suddenly fall silent or laugh boisterously. We don’t know what they are saying. They stare at us. Of course, they are mocking us. And it is because they are all laughing at us that they form such a tightknit group. They don't know who we are but it is because we are looking that they exist. This staging of class society is also an allegory of theater. Might not the end of the world be a matter of representation?