Theatre of War Commemorating World War I in Belgium Karel Vanhaesebrouck From 1914 until 1918 Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, was devastated by World War I. In commemoration of the war’s centenary, the Flemish government spared no trouble or expense to present a complete, immersive experience, which included walking and cycling tours, refurbished museums, newly cleaned town centers, and interactive events. Meanwhile, the num- ber of historical publications on the topic keeps growing. In 2015, VRT, the Dutch-speaking public broadcasting system, produced In Vlaamse Velden (In Flanders’ Fields), a prestigious Karel Vanhaesebrouck is Professor of theatre and performance studies at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), where he coordinates the research group THEA | Theatricality and the Real. He also lectures in theatre history and cultural history at the Brussels-based Theatre and Film school RITCS. His scholarly work has been published in journals such as Poetics Today, Theatre Topics, Image & Narrative, Contemporary Theatre, Critique, Etudes Théâtrales, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, Théâtre/Public, Cahiers naturalists, and Crisis & Critique. He occasionally works as a dramaturg, mostly but not exclusively for Theater Antigone. [email protected] TDR: The Drama Review 61:4 (T236) Winter 2017. ©2017 40 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00691 by guest on 02 October 2021 TV series that enabled viewers to wallow in the mud of the trenches and the squalor of war. Historian Sophie De Schaepdrijver, author of the seminal work De Groote Oorlog (The Great War; 1997), was asked to write a four-part nonfiction series,Brave Little Belgium (Schaepdrijver and De Geest 2014), for the VRT. Specific historical occasions were commemorated with large-scale events. On 17 October 2014 the Province of West Flanders organized the grand participatory Lichtfront (Battlefront of Light), the start of the GoneWest cultural commemoration program. Lichtfront evoked the frontline as it was in October 1914, during the Battle of the Yser, when the bloody strug- gle had somewhat abated after the Yser plain had been inundated on the orders of King Albert I of Belgium. The Lichtfront consisted of a human chain of torches and fire baskets running through 10 communities, all with iconic WWI names for whoever visited Flanders Fields: Nieuwpoort, Diksmuide, Lo-Reninge, Houthulst, Langemark-Poelkapelle, Ieper, Zonnebeke, Heuvelland, Mesen, Komen-Waasten. Even now — and we are not yet halfway through the centenary as I write this article — some critical commentators are talking about “poppy indigestion.” Theatre companies and per- formance artists also swooped down on the war years. A huge number of shows, from small- scale local productions to inter- national coproductions, directly or indirectly commemorated the Great War. In Front (2014), for example, the Flemish director Luk Perceval evoked the harsh life of soldiers and villagers on both sides of the frontline. The Dutch theatre company Hotel Modern presented a painstak- ingly beautiful evocation of the violence and pain in and around the trenches in De Groote Oorlog (The Great War; 2001) using a Figure 2. The actors animate a miniature landscape of the Western Front, which miniature live film set that the is screened live by means of small cameras. The Great War by Hotel Modern. actors re-created during the Rotterdam Schouwburg, 2001. (Photo by Joost van den Broek and Herman Helle) performance, an almost cine- matographic image of the war landscape (Bleeker 2010) (fig. 2). Flemish performance artist Pieter Van den Bosch staged a show that mainly consisted of a series of carefully arranged explosions, giving a humorous per- spective on warfare. Artists as diverse as Thomas Bellinck (Memento Park, 2015), Cie Barbarie (Risk, 2015), Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (Shell Shock, 2015), Tom Lanoye (Gaz, 2016), Pieter De Buysser (Immerwahr, 2015), and De Warme Winkel (Gavrillo Princip, 2015) commemorated the war. The commercial company Studio 100 produced a spectacular musical, 14–18, that com- mented on the commemoration itself. At the same time, many “commemoration events” took place all over the globe invoking the diverse memories of specific groups and nations. Taken as a single phenomenon, these events are an integral part of a booming branch of tourism focusing WWI Commemorations Figure 1. (facing page) Stef Stessels’s set design evokes the gloomy architecture of cold war communism but also the nightmarish atmosphere of a cirucular hotel hall. Karlijn Sileghem, Joris Hessels, and Mark Verstraete in Memento Park. Directed by Thomas Bellinck, produced by KVS and Steigeisen. KVS, Brussels, 2015. (Photo by Stef Stessel) 41 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00691 by guest on 02 October 2021 on cultural trauma. The makers of these events employ theatrical strategies to stage imagined communities and shared histories (Schneider 2011). The province of West Flanders decided to set up a full-scale program of events and publi- cations called “GoneWest,” referring both to the actual region of the Western Front as well as to the iconic Pet Shop Boys song. GoneWest reminds spectators that Flanders, the Northern, Dutch-speaking part of Belgium (and more specifically the western outskirt of this region) is a complex site of remembrance where cultural memory, heritage tourism, and commercial brand- ing go hand in hand, in a way which is very different from memorial culture in Walloonia, the Southern, French-speaking part of Belgium. The linguistic divide between North and South had a crucial impact on the way inhabitants have commemorated the First World War, as it was also a social divide, French often being the language of high-ranking officers while the Flemings mainly occupied the lower ranks in the Belgian army. A close reading of two theatre productions — Memento Park (2015) directed by Thomas Bellinck and Oeps (2016) directed by Raven Ruell and Jos Verbist — illuminates the “performed imaginaries” (Schechner 2015) sur- rounding WWI culture and the different ways in which theatre-makers deconstruct the very cultural events they (re)enact. I also hope to show how their work relates to the specific theatri- cality of commemoration events outside of the theatre. Together these projects interface between cultural memory (in Flanders) on the one hand and notions of citizenship, belonging, nation- hood, race, ethnicity, and religion on the other. Why do the European memorial responses to WWI systematically omit non-European experiences on the Western Front? What happened to Aboriginal Australians, Maoris, Native North Americans, and Congolese? Each of these memorial performances approaches cultural memory in a different way. Memento Park is an explicit comment on the heritage craze. Bellinck’s direction focuses on the provincial entrepreneurship of the small fry who try to get a piece of the commemoration pie and thus remain blind to the contradictions inherent in commemoration culture. Oeps offers a radical present-day point of view that, in Theater Antigone’s thoroughly researched produc- tion, argues that WWI never ended, that the same imperialist interests are still in play in 2016, and that historiography as well as journalistic news coverage are in need of a radical revision. In both productions, documentary sources are explicitly used and, via sampling and editing, welded together into a score. I was the dramaturg and author-editor of Oeps. For Memento Park I will focus on the analysis of the end result, whereas for Oeps I will consider the production process. Cultural Memory as a Battlefield “The past is never what it is, it is what we make of it,” begins Marc Reynebeau in his Het nut van het verleden (The usefulness of the past; 2006:7). Reynebeau shows how we need history to make sense of our past, to give events and objects from the past a place in the present. The past is therefore not an unchangeable entity: what an individual or a group thinks about the past depends on the period from which the past is considered. So we can never definitively grasp the past: whenever a light is shed on the past, the past changes (White 1973). Our relation to the past is invariably multiperspectival. The historian, therefore, should not gloss over that vari- ance, the fact that the past is fundamentally unknowable. On the contrary, it is precisely this variety the historian should reveal — not the historical reality, but the range of historical reali- ties. Rather than bring order to events, the historian accepts the disorder of history as a start- ing point. That disorder is central in Memento Park and Oeps, albeit in totally different ways. Memento Park shows how an unequivocal interpretation of a historical reality falls victim to commercialization. Oeps critically addresses the fact that our relation to the past is highly selec- tive; a story always told from the point of view of the victors. History and culture meet in memory. Indeed, that is where the heart of cultural history is beating, not in the facts, but in imagining those facts. Each culture has its own memory (see for example Erll and Nünning 2008; Rigney 2012). A memory stores some information, but also forgets things. Within the framework of a cultural history forgetting is as important as remem- Karel Vanhaesebrouck 42 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00691 by guest on 02 October 2021 bering. Memory is the capacity to make the past present again, even in the face of questions about whether or not these events actually happened or were just part of the imagination. These recollections get a place in the memory that is considered by a group to be fundamental (they are so important that they have to be passed on) and foundational (they are regarded as signifi- cant cornerstones for a specific identity).