Stage director Arne Sierens on Compagnie Cecilia
Director Arne Sierens says the starting point for almost all his plays are character studies.
Compagnie Cecilia co-founder says he's not interested in mere storytelling
But he does it with a smile. For an audience, it’s inevitable: you pity, empathise, commit, wallow in emotion and burst with laughter. “I keep on looking for the boundaries of the truth,” says the Flemish stage director and co-founder of Ghent’s Compagnie Cecilia.
Sierens is busy. He runs the company together with its other co-founder, actor Johan Heldenbergh. Only six months after the premiere of Cecilia’s Gloria, his newest work, Lacrima, is touring the country. Two weeks ago, he finished the script for Belgica, the new feature film by Flemish director Felix Van Groeningen, based on the history of Ghent’s famous rock’n’roll club Café Charlatan. Now Sierens is rehearsing Ensor, another new production featuring Heldenbergh and acrobats from Circus Ronaldo. In the meantime, Van Groeningen’s film The Broken Circle Breakdown, based on a 2008 Cecilia play, could get nominated for an Oscar.
I meet Sierens in the eye of the storm, on the terrace in front of Ghent’s Minard theatre. The statue of Romain Deconinck, beacon of Ghent’s working-class theatre, is watching us. I make the mistake of comparing the two.
“No,” he says, “my characters are drawings. I paint them in colour, not in black-and-white. I turn them inside out. They have to talk; all of them have the gift of the gab. Lots of people mistake that for a working-class attitude, but that’s not always true. I want to show the totality of being human, la condition humaine. My main characters might as well be professors or doctors. I will also turn them inside out. But I will always add some rock’n’roll. Things have to go crazy.”
Physical theatre
The starting points of almost all of his plays, Sierens explains, are character studies. “I don’t start with a book shelf,” he smiles. “I start with one of the many piles in my study. I collect articles, movies, books, pictures – things that stick in my mind, that give me goosebumps. I put it on one of my piles. Then I choose a pile, think of a title, a theme and start looking for actors.”
Most Western theatre is cerebral. We start with the body.
When he’s found them, he asks them to utilise pieces from the pile that touch them. “They improvise, and we start moulding the characters, together. Nobody knows what the result will be. This is how Compagnie Cecilia makes theatre: based on characters, closely connected with 20th-century avant-garde.”
The result, he says, “is physical theatre. Most Western theatre is cerebral, made out of text and intellectual constructions. We start with the body. The voice must come from within the body, not the head. What you say must come from deep within.”
For those who know Sierens’ work, it might sound strange, but he’s not in the least interested in telling a story. “I am constantly looking for humanity, that’s all. I work with coincidences, mistakes and people’s fault lines. I mean, when people get emotional, they might start a sentence, suddenly forget about it and end up in some completely different place. When people blurt out things they weren’t supposed to say, it’s more truthful than ever. That is what I am looking for: slips of the tongue that reveal their deepest truths.”
Sierens also listens to stories people tell with their bodies. “You can see it everywhere: in bars, on the streets. The way people move their head, walk or use their hands tells a story. It’s emotional patterns of movement. Nothing is more fascinating than that.”
Boxing match
This personal fascination, he explains, eventually leads to a play. “What I want to make is a musical and a physical score. I make a dance of movement and words. Just like a choreographer.”
I have the tendency to create plays with ‘impossibilities’
With this unique method of working, Sierens has succeeded in creating plays that are addictive, that keep audiences hooked from beginning to end. “The theatre we offer is no reproduction,” he says. “Each night is another boxing match. It is real. I have the tendency to create plays with ‘impossibilities’: They are impossible for the actors to play perfectly. I force them to surprise each other on stage. Of course, things go wrong. They have to. Everyone is forced to react in a different way than the night before. Nobody really knows what is going to happen.”
In Cecilia’s first-ever production, 2004’s Maria Eeuwigdurende Bijstand, the actors had to perform on an ice rink without skates. “They would constantly fall. It influenced their way of acting, the tonality of their voices. The audience sees that it is real, not acted. They recognise it, they laugh about it, but most importantly they see and feel that it is human.”
Lacrima
Lacrima is Cecilia’s season opener. A man promises his ex-girlfriend to search for her lost son in the city where he grew up, where he lost all of his illusions and where he has sworn to never return.
“As opposed to all my other plays, this one I wrote at the desk in my study,” says Sierens. “I have been thinking about this story for more than 20 years. It was Van Groeningen, he says, who convinced him to write it down.
There are only two people on stage. Actor Jan Hammenecker talks, dancer Sayaka Kaiwa moves around, inside and on top of 16 tons of concrete blocks. “A Japanese dancer who doesn’t understand a word of Dutch,” says Sierens. “She’s a fantastic dancer, but I forbid her to dance on stage. She just reacts and follows her impulses.”
Lacrima
16 October to 2 November
NTGent Minnemeers
Minnemeers 8, Ghent
www.compagnie-cecilia.be
