Hof Van Eede

The theatre company Hof van Eede was founded in 2011 by Wannes Gyselinck and Ans Van den Eede. Until 2018, Louise Van den Eede was also a member, and Greg Timmermans has been a core actor since 2019. Hof van Eede believes in working collectively. Its plays are written and productions created as a group. The theatre-makers see their collective writing practice as an alchemical process whose result is more than the sum of its separate parts: “Individually, each of us writes in our own way, though the unanimity of this is still somewhat one-dimensional. It is when we brings these writings into close contact with one another that something complex, intriguing and vital is created”.

Hof van Eede intentionally writes text-theatre. It is opposed to theatre which seeks its authenticity in the visual and the physical, reducing language to a mere vehicle for all manner of opinions and messages. One of the striking characteristics of Hof van Eede’s plays is their explicit allusion to and incorporation of literature. This is a direct consequence of the way they view language, and of how, at the moment, language is increasingly being used for manipulation and ideology: “It is true that we are intensely engaged with language. This is due in part to our obsession with literature, as well as to our belief that we are living in an era in which words are used dogmatically, to create reality rather than question it.” In the face of this dogmatic and manipulative use of language, Hof van Eede champions a “certain way of speaking that is disappearing: speaking searchingly, formulating things precisely.” Literature is the perfect place for searching speech of this kind of speaking searchingly. It is no coincidence that Hof van Eede references modernist authors such as Proust, Nescio, Kafka, Rilke and others, writers who have honed the language to express the multiplicity and elusiveness of human experience. Hof van Eede does not adapt these writers for the theatre, but regards them as conversation partners from the past with whom it tries to clarify its own place in the present: “Emancipation does not mean cutting yourself loose from the culture that has shaped you. Emancipation means taking up a position with regard to the ground that supports you.” The fascination with literature goes hand in hand with another important theme in Hof van Eede’s plays: the relationship between life and art. How heavily can or may the artistic experience weigh upon life? Do we only truly experience something if this experience is shaped and intensified by art? Or is the detour of art an obstacle to our own personal experience? 

"However, in Hof van Eede’s most recent plays there is a clear shift from an existential to a more social theme. The characters are the incarnation of conflicting ideas and positions on a series of contemporary themes (Europe, activism, global warming, etc.) without a single one of these perspectives being pushed to the fore. Hof van Eede explicitly chooses to present a wide range of opinions and life choices to its audience."

It would be premature and overly narrow to conclude from all this that Hof van Eede primarily writes cerebral and elitist plays. The audience is addressed in a generous and open performance. Dialogues are interwoven with considerable humour, a lightness of touch, wordplay and a sense of perspective, as well as paradoxes and incongruities. Thus a language is created which in its best moments is both sensuous and poetic, analytic and contemplative. Using literature, and through discussion, association, nuance and elaboration, Hof van Eede searches for a way to access contemporary experiences such as ‘being young’, ‘idolatry’, ‘empathy’ ‘exile’, ‘revolution’, ‘retreating from the world’, etc.: “On stage we want to validate the detour, recapture language, and once again honour the complexity of language. Not in order to play around, but because reality itself is complex.”

For their first production, Waar het met de wereld naartoe gaat, daar gaan wij naartoe (2011), the company drew inspiration from Jacques the Fatalist and His Master (1773), the satirical novel by Denis Diderot, one of the great Enlightenment writers. The novel recounts a journey taken by Jacques and his master. It is a novel that plays with literary genres and narrative techniques, is full of interruptions and elaborations, and undermines any romantic illusion. In this novel, Diderot expresses his doubts regarding the linear optimism about progress that he adhered to whilst working on the famous Encyclopédie (1750-65). This is a take on life that Hof van Eede mimics and in which it recognises itself. Waar het met de wereld naartoe gaat, daar gaan wij naartoe is a dialogue between a he and a she (and the audience). Right from the start, they make it clear that they wanted to do something with Diderot’s novel, but that they did not succeed. In the novel, Jacques tells a love story, but is constantly interrupted and does not make it to the end. In the same way, the ‘she’ and the ‘he’ do not succeed in saying what exactly they wanted to do with the novel, because they constantly stray from the point and talk about their own love affair. It ultimately ends with a paradox: 

perhaps that is the secret of love
if we still touch upon the majority
the heart of the matter/ if we conceal it
perhaps it must remain unnameable
in fact
perhaps we simply have to keep on talking in order to avoid mentioning it at all costs.”

Dorstig (2013) is about what it means to be young, both in its ecstatic and overconfident moments, and in its melancholy, which already heralds the end of youth and life lived through memories. Four friends stand on the threshold of adulthood. They are thirsty for life, brimming with expectations, ideals and ambitions. They initially identify themselves with Eugène de Rastignac, a character from Balzac’s novel cycle The Human Comedy (1830-1856) who dives headlong into fashionable Parisian life. Later they identify themselves with Nescio’s Young Titans (1915): four friends who look back on the ideas and the Sturm und Drang period of their youth. Dorstig is about the transition from ‘living in the moment’ to a realisation that the moment has definitively passed and can only be recalled in memory, and therefore through language: “Can you research the question of being young if you are in the middle of it? Whilst that very ‘being in the middle of it’ is so confusing?” It is no coincidence that Nescio, Jan Grönloh’s pseudonym, means: ‘I don’t know’.

Het Weiss-effect (2014) is also about confusion, the confusion of losing oneself in the myth of art and the mythology of the artist. Three actors try to breathe life into their idol, the (fictitious) thinker and writer Edgar Weiss, by, amongst other things, reconstructing the morning when he created his ultimate work in as much detail as possible. Unlike the Werther effect, which led to several young people committing suicide after reading Goethe’s eponymous novel, the Weiss effect has a solely positive and life-affirming impact on its admirers. The question that Hof van Eede poses is whether art draws us closer to, or pushes us further away from, reality and our own experience. “For example, it also took me ages to appreciate the beauty of a petrol station./ It’s only since I got to know Edward Hopper that each time I fill up my car,/ I feel like I’m filling up in a painting”, says one of the actors. Art can refine our view of reality. But saying that a larch is your favourite tree because you have read somewhere that larches play a pivotal role in Beckett’s work? How far removed from manipulation and ideology are we then? “Art is capable of charging life’s banality with poetry. Of course, language can also stand in the way of experience. This is a question that occupies us: how much fiction does a person need to get through the day?”

The starting point for Paradis (2015) is not a novel, but a chance discovery of the photo album of a family with a growing son. The album breaks off abruptly, with seven police photos followed by a cut-out death notice for the sixteen-year-old boy. For Hof van Eede, the life story and sorrow of an unknown family becomes a laboratory in which to consider and imagine future empathy, grief and loss. Here too there is a palpable tension between inner lived experience and its expression, between emotion and language. Are there experiences that do not tolerate language? Are there experiences for which every word is the wrong word? Is music better able to absorb, accompany or conjure up this emotion of loss and grief? 

From Vanish Beach (2017) onwards, Hof van Eede’s work has had a clear social dimension. Vanish Beach focuses on themes such as exile and homesickness, Europe versus America, nostalgia versus optimism, conservatism versus progress, tradition versus innovation, and activism versus a feeling of powerlessness. It is striking that from this point onwards, Hof van Eede draws more inspiration from existing people than from fictitious characters such as Jacques, the Young Titans, and Edgar Weiss. 

Vanish Beach is based on the experiences and writings of a number of major German writers and intellectuals who fled from the Nazis in Germany and Austria in the 1930s and found shelter in California. These included Arnold Schönberg, Thomas Mann, Theodor Adorno, Bertolt Brecht and Alma Mahler-Werfel. The text is a confrontation between the depth of European culture and the weight of its intellectual tradition, and the lightness of the Californian sun and the superficial glamour of Hollywood. The characters seek out their place in a new world dominated by the free market and the ideal of unlimited consumption, whilst continuing to be haunted by the European humanistic heritage which is on the point of being destroyed for good. In despair and swathed in gloom, the exiles attempt to reconstruct the streets, shops and cafés of Vienna from memory: “But why would you be so keen to save our ‘European values’, our ‘contraband’, if they have not saved us in the past, and if they have perhaps brought us to where we are today, in the desert?”

After the inaction of exile, Salon Secret (2018) focuses on the desire to change the world, and on the possibility of resistance and revolution. Five like-minded people meet up secretly in an abandoned living room and discuss what could and should happen. They debate how to organise themselves, how to communicate with the common people, and the necessity of using violence. They cite examples from the past: Rosa Parks, the black woman who refused to give up her seat on the bus for a white person; the nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary Nechayev; and Jan Polach, who set himself alight in Prague in protest against the Russian invasion. But they primarily talk about the possibility of a new language and a new imagination: 

Humans have succeeded in inventing the future through language.
That is crazy.
Listen: ‘Things will get better.’
Do you hear it? Bang. I say ‘will’ and that word suddenly opens up a hole in time,
and that hole is what we call the future.
Incredible, isn’t it?
And yes, the future is uncertain,
but that is exactly how the future should be. 

Just like both the above plays, The Big Drop Out (2019) raises a political issue: the climate crisis and its consequences. What if we were to exit the system? What if we no longer seek to change the system like in Salon Secret, but exit it, refuse to collaborate in the knowledge that it is impossible anyway? Two characters have retreated to a painter’s studio on a mountain, a painter (based on Agnes Martin) and an ex-environmental activist (based on Paul Kingsnorth). They are joined by three other characters: an activist, an ambitious dropout and a poet. Things culminate in a heated discussion about intervening actively to change the world, or finding a way to grieve because in the meantime it is too late. The choice between hope and despair is not binary here either. Hof van Eede gives free rein to the drama of irreconcilable positions. Therein lies a generous attitude towards its audience, which is at least obliged to reflect.

Hof van Eede’s plays are characterised by a remarkable wealth of thoughts and perspectives on a series of existential experiences and contemporary political challenges. The explicit incorporation of literary texts and the high degree of linguistic awareness play a pivotal role. Intellectual self-reflection, partially expressed in a meta-theatrical consciousness, is balanced by a healthy dose of humour, narrative generosity, and a subtle playing with language; none of which undermines its seriousness.

DOWNLOAD TEXT EXCERPT FROM ‘VANISH BEACH’

CONTACT
info@hofvaneede.be
+32 488 69 37 09
www.hofvaneede.be

Written by: Erwin Jans

Translated by: Nadine Malfait

Erwin Jans is currently working as a dramaturg at Toneelhuis in Antwerpen. He  teaches theater and drama at Artesis Hogeschool Antwerpen where he also does research on the history of the dramatic text. He writes extensively on literature, theater and culture. He published Interculturele intoxicaties. Over kunst, cultuur en verschil (Intercultural intoxications. On art, culture and diversity) (2006). He was co-editor of an anthology of Flemish postwar poetry Hotel New Flandres (2008). Together with the philosopher Eric Clemens he wrote an essay on democracy that was also translated in French (2010). Last year he published an anthology of the dramatic work of the Flemish playwright and director Tone Brulin (2017).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Texts available in Dutch, unless stated otherwise

• Waar het met de wereld naartoe gaat, daar gaan wij naartoe (2012)
• Dorstig (2013)
• Het Weiss-Effect (2014)
• Paradis (2015)
• Vanish Beach (2017)
• Odessa (2017) - short monologue for Brutalavista/Brutaal Brugge
• Salon Secret (2018) - in collaboration with Arsenaal/Lazarus & Kopergietery
• Design Your Own Life (2018) - short scene for Always In The Kitchen van Gouvernement/CAMPO
• The Big Drop-Out (2019)
• VECHTSTUK (2021)
• DAVID of hoe we ons bedacht hebben (2021) - a coproduction of Cie de KOE, De Nwe Tijd and Hof van Eede