Can I whisper something, tell you something I'd rather not say out loud? Can I bring you a flood of words, that takes away your breath, that leaves you numb?
I wish I could. Perhaps one day I can.
But in the meantime, there is theatre. Of course I have no idea where you are in the world, and whether there are theatres where you live. But they exist. Perhaps that knowledge is enough to sustain you.
...wherever you are in the world...
I found myself riding my bike home...
... after an hour and a half of sheer beauty, of words that do not linger but are doubling, tripling the tension. The audience was in agony, you felt how they wished they could leave, they knew the mistake of coming here the moment the doors closed, but they found themselves trapped in their seats, unable to stand up against the sounds that were uttered, murmured.
Half the audience didn't get it. The other half couldn't even hear it. I was alone, utterly alone, in a crowd full of old people who had forgotten what it means to listen. Who couldn't hear the girl as she spoke. Her voice trembling from strength. The man and his utter nonsense. The girl asking the questions we normally hide behind the furniture of every-day-life. She whispered what I one day hope to dare to whisper.... Why... Why do we live... Why don't we wonder about what we do... Why can't we say what we feel...
... I heard the wind touching the trees and my hair. And I rode my bike...
...along empty parking lots, forgotten but monitored by faceless cameras that don't move with the wind. Along half erected office buildings without windows, with just large empty holes and scaffolding and materials lying around. And I wanted to be there, and hear the wind whistle past the bricks, through the holes that are nothing but empty space. But I couldn't stop, there was darkness and the beating of my heart and the words still echoing in my mind... what had I seen? Could I keep this feeling forever, could I stop everyone who dared distract me? Could I remain alone like this, not having to care about anything just yet? Could I please keep those voices alive and that the people didn't clap for something they couldn't understand anyway?
I often get this feeling, that things are made only for me. For how else would someone else be able to feel anything, when not getting it, when not feeling what I feel? Because I hear them talk, afterwards, the audience, about little things, about which bus to take. And then I want to cry. For them, for their inability to experience beauty like me. For me, for my inability to share my experience of beauty with them.
And yet, there must be other people who feel like this. Maybe one or two...
Because this kind of theatre is still being made. Not the Greek catharsis-filled action that tells a story. But the plays that are just words, that show the loneliness of existence, the nothingness of being, the gravity of life. Of words that can flow and keep on flowing without having to be interrupted by anything remotely related to entertainment.
I would like to meet people who experience theatre like that. Who would like to just sit there, and bleed. Who have no desire to comfort or to bandage. Because there is nothing to salvage. That is the beauty of it.
Inspired by a play from NT Gent, 'Menuet' performed in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, May 2nd, 2018. Menuet is an adaptation of a book by Louis Paul Boon, a Flemish author (1912-1979)
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