It’s not a big surprise that TAZ is teaming up with De Roovers; in fact they are somehow contemporaries. The theatre festival arose 17 years ago, De Roovers 19 years ago. And De Roovers’ Robby Cleiren, the actor/theatre-maker I meet in the company’s Berchem office, has a long bond with Luc Muylaert, now the festival’s artistic director, dating back to the time they both worked for Flemish public television.

“Between 1998 and 2002 I was playing in the TV series Recht op Recht (Canvas is rebroadcasting it right now) and Luc was working there as a light and sound technician,” Cleiren recalls. “Back then TAZ was still a small festival: During the holidays it selected plays out of the regular season as well as new work from upcoming talent. For four years Luc invited me to sit on the jury for young theatre work. It allowed me to follow new players and theatre-makers, and to see some performances I’d missed during the year.”

This basic objective hasn’t really changed, though the festival has kept on growing, expanding its scope to music, literature and films. This year TAZ invites 20 young theatre-makers, eight young filmmakers and their short movies, eight promising authors and six unknown bands. The exact formula has been adjusted over the years, by appointing music and theatre curators, which has kept the bill fresh, and by putting more emphasis on projects on location.

With the opening of the new cultural centre De Grote Post last December, Ostend has a big covered theatre hall for indoor performances. TAZ welcomes the new infrastructure, a nicely renovated old post office building, but that doesn’t mean the organisers have scaled down the projects at other sites in the city. For Cleiren, pictured on the cover, second left, with De Roovers’ fixed core of actors and theatre-makers Sara De Bosschere, Luc Nuyens and Sofie Sente, and for scenographer Stef Stessel, it’s an opportunity to blow off the dust from three past location projects.

For TAZ, they are repeating a big co-production with eight actors, 10 musicians, 16 singers and a head chef that they did for the Zomer Van Antwerpen. De Noces/Svadebka/ De Bruiloft (pictured) was played in a railway hangar next to the Antwerp-Dam station during the whole of July 2005. This festive and very speedy play set around a giant wedding party table is based on the works of Chekhov and Stravinsky and in Ostend again occupies a big railway warehouse.

Old friends

“Projects on location do give another dynamic,” says Cleiren. “For us it’s a bit like a boy scouts camp. We’re reaching another audience, it’s energising and inspiring. We’re always looking for ways to refresh plays. Like old friends, we want to keep on visiting them.”

Like Blue Remembered Hills (pictured), originally a TV movie by English writer Dennis Potter. It’s about seven children in the English countryside in 1943 “playing war” and examining the thin line between playfulness and cruelty. For TAZ, De Roovers will take the audience to the nearby dunes, making the metaphor with the real war even more striking.

The last location project is Van De Brug Af Gezien (A View From The Bridge) by the New York playwright Arthur Miller, a drama about an Italian dockworker and his illegal compatriots in the New York of the 1950s. De Roovers played it in 2002 and Cleiren can only note that in the year 2013 the immigration theme is still as relevant as ever.

“Especially in Ostend, where illegal immigrants hide and try to make the passage to England,” he explains. “It’s a tragic love story, and a Greek drama. But the Greeks could blame the gods, and here it’s only people who are to blame. To leave everything behind, searching for a piece of paradise, can be utterly frustrating.”

De Roovers have always mixed old theatre texts with new insights about themselves and the outside world. But what was the leitmotiv for selecting other artists? “We deliberately picked artists carrying the responsibility for their plays themselves,” says Cleiren. As a small collective, De Roovers are not used to working with tight stage management. “We are equally, as actors and as theatremakers, responsible… We work as accomplices. Like TAZ we have a small structure and little hierarchy.” The actor credits their theatre education at the Antwerp conservatory for that. “In the early 1990s the school was still headed by Dora van der Groen and we had teachers like Sam Bogaerts, Ivo Van Hove and Jan-Joris Lamers. We were encouraged to make our own plays and our teachers forced us to think about what we really wanted to achieve. We didn’t learn just how to play Hamlet, but also why.”

Later in their professional life the foursome kept on asking the same questions. “We live on a small island in a big world, but a least it’s our island. It gives us freedom and a lot of work.” From that perspective it’s not so remarkable that they chose Scheisseimer, a monologue by the 78-year-old Ghent artist Koenraad Tinel. “We were all impressed by the very simple but genuine manner in which this sculptor and designer – he’s not even an actor – told his moving life story.” Mixing actors and theatre-makers from different generations has always proved fruitful for De Roovers. Their internship at NTGent during the last year at conservatory was instructive: “Director Sam Bogaerts surrounded his actors with young talent, so they would not rust away. And as young performers we could learn a lot from them.” Everything comes in cycles. Now De Roovers have invited Bogaerts’ son’s jazz band, the Erik Bogaerts Kvartett, to perform at TAZ.

TAZ has always been a meeting point for the theatre scene. Lost connections become connected again. Also De Roovers use the festival to present some of their former friends and colleagues. “When starting out we made a lot of plays with actor Adriaan Van den Hoof, who would later focus on his television and comedy career. Now we are offering him the chance to pick up his theatre career again.”

A lot of the invited musicians have made music for De Roovers in the past: Peter Vermeersch, David Bovée, Bjorn Eriksson, Frank Vander linden. Now they have been invited to show their latest projects in Ostend. Vermeersch and Bovée, praised by The Roovers for their out-of-the-box thinking, even flew to Banjul in Gambia to improvise with local musicians and drummers. The result is premiered at TAZ.

Eriksson presents The Broken Circle Bluegrass Band and will invite Cleiren on stage. The actor will play the mandolin, just like he did in the successful Flemish movie The Broken Circle Breakdown, though he has second thoughts about the invitation. “Sometimes I meet the band’s real mandolin player, in front of the school my daughter goes to. He’s also a father and the most virtuoso mandolin player around.”

Cleiren is less uncertain about the Byrning Down the House gig he will do (on guitar and synth) with the tribute band We Are Not Talking Heads (pictured). With Erik Engels, De Roovers’ sound designer, and eight other actors and musicians they will stage a “re-enactment” of the Talking Heads concert movie Stop Making Sense.

Tight schedule

That concert will be the climax of a festival that, for Cleiren, will be the opposite of what he has been used to. “Can you imagine that after dropping by in Ostend summer after summer I’ve never performed on a TAZ stage? Once I made a play with conservatory students, updating a piece by curator Michael De Cock, but that’s it. And now I will be on stage for 10 days in a row. The schedule is so tight there will be no time to see our guests, apart from after the show. Staying disciplined and going to bed not too late will be our biggest challenge. Otherwise we won’t survive.”

After almost 20 years working in what he calls “an old and slow medium”, this won’t be a problem for Cleiren. The main challenges are at another level. “At the drama academy,” he says, “I’m confronted with a generation of students having difficulties reading a play for two hours, but they do know how they will market their career that still has to start. They’re fast, and they’re used to being entertained all the time. How can theatre react to this? How can we be part of this fast-changing world, and stay true to our principles?” Those questions will keep De Roovers alive.

1-10 August

TAZ#2013

Ostend

www.theateraanzee.be