De Parade & Rudi Meulemans

In this way he learnt that another person’s heart and mind are unknowable,

even unapproachable, except in fantasies and projections

which in reality are elements from the life of the knower, not of the other.
Martha Nussbaum

1. De Parade

In 1987 the author and director Rudi Meulemans set up the De Parade theatre company in Brussels. With this group, he has over the years consistently built up a series of plays that occupy a highly individual position in the Flemish theatre world.

Meulemans’ theatre is characterised by a refined austerity; it is a theatre of the essential, theatre that focuses on the actor and the word.

The plays Meulemans has written for the company in its almost twenty years of existence display a highly documentary and autobiographical nature. He has always been intrigued by the lives of artists. This has led him to take a close look at a.o. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Virginia Woolf, Erika Mann, Derek Jarman, Jane Bowles, Francis Bacon, Robert Mapplethorpe, Romy Schneider and Billie Holiday. In most cases his affinity for their work also led him to an interest in their lives. The way artists’ life and work are intertwined is a thread running through his activities as an author and director.

2. Rudi Meulemans

When Rudi Meulemans (b. 1963) was about sixteen, a friend took him to a performance by Pina Bausch in Rotterdam; it was most likely Café Müller. This made a powerful impression on him because he saw that ‘theatre’ could be a great deal more than and completely different from what he had previously seen traditional companies performing. The openness with which Pina Bausch set to work pressed a button somewhere inside him.

When he studied at the RITS (then still called RITCS), it was mainly the lecturer Alex van Royen who showed him the way. Meulemans started to read – plays, philosophical works and literature; he went to films and the theatre; he started to ‘fill himself up’ in all sorts of ways. ‘Because,’ as he himself said, ‘that is after all what one’s studies are for.’

Immediately after graduating he established his own theatre organisation called De Parade and that has always remained his sole field of action. He has never branched out to direct anywhere else. The actors he has assembled around him are also remarkably loyal in their professional choices. Even though Willem Carpentier, Caroline Rottier, Andreas Van de Maele, Hilde Wils and, more recently, Tom de Hoog and Johan Heestermans, were never fully employed for long periods (the company only received an operating subsidy from 1993 to 1997), it seems they always return.

3. A stream that continues to flow

When, from 1987, Rudi Meulemans started to develop his own projects at De Parade, he at first opted to direct existing plays (by Wolfgang Bauer, David Mercer, etc.). In the initial stages, taking an existing text as a basis enabled him to concentrate on the staging, the performance and the actors.

His production of De Lederman spreekt met Hubert Fichte (1991) signalled the mature culmination of this first period of learning and he saw it as the true starting point for De Parade. It is true that a great many elements of both form and content seen in this production were to return constantly in later work; one might say that as from De Lederman, Rudi Meulemans had found his own style. De Lederman in fact actually existed: he was Hans Eppendorfer, a murderer, ex-convict and homosexual who after his release told the story of his life in three interviews with the journalist Hubert Fichte. The choice of a biography of a living person, the focus on someone in a marginal position in society, the conversation/interview as an objectifying form for theatrical dialogue, the thematic link between sexuality and violence, etc., are all elements which were to largely define Rudi Meulemans’ style and theatrical world.

In addition, a working method was immediately established in which a new production naturally emerged from the work done on a previous one: in his interviews, Lederman talks at length about the Italian poet and film director Pasolini (and his violent death). Pasolini was then the leading character in the next project by De Parade, De knie van de voetballer. The work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault was present as study material in Meulemans’ work from the very beginning, which in 1997 led to the play Rue d’Ulm, on Foucault’s life and thought, etc.

To quote Rudi Meulemans, ‘letting one project run on into the next is actually – this may sound rather banal – more a way of living than of working. I don’t see making plays as a job; life and work coincide; even if you’re not rehearsing or performing, the work carries on anyway. One does not seek out these parallels or lines, they arise almost of their own accord.’

In this way, one can see Paula, a maid with the Freud family in Herinneringen aan de Donau (1994), as foreshadowing Jessie Lightfoot in the play about the painter Francis Bacon, Life is all we have (2003): in both cases ‘a woman in the shadow of...’. In the same way the relationship between Erika and Klaus Mann in the monologue Mann (1998) can be compared to that between Paul and Jane Bowles in Marokko (1997) and that of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe in Don’t touch here (2004): a strange, erotically highly-charged complicity (though not experienced as sexual) between sister and brother, man and wife, male and female friends. And again, the decline due to Aids is followed in Modern Nature (1993, based on the diaries of the British film director Derek Jarman), Rue d’Ulm (regarding Foucault) and Don’t touch here (regarding Robert Mapplethorpe). The ‘darkroom scene’ in the last of these three even refers back to the sauna episode in De Lederman. And so on...

4. The first cycle

After De Lederman, Meulemans started, initially together with Willem Carpentier, writing or compiling his own plays. De Lederman became the first of a four-part cycle called 1991-1994 Journalistiek werk. The other parts are:

- De knie van de voetballer, mainly comprising writings by and interviews with Pasolini;

- Amerikaanse dromen, a documentary full of witness statements, official documents, hearings, etc., in connection with the report compiled by the Meese Commission, set up by President Reagan, to draw up a law to prohibit pornography in the USA;

- and Herinneringen aan de Donau, which focuses on the life of Sigmund Freud in the Nazi period and on one of his best-known patients, ‘the wolfman’.

One of the themes that links these four plays is that of all-destroying desire: ‘a longing that subordinates everything to itself. A desire that destroys the world in order to extract from it one single object of desire. And then it proceeds to the destruction of the self, to non-being, to death as the only possible solution to this never ending violence.’

Rudi Meulemans likes to work in cycles because it brings a sort of restfulness to the work: the things you have no place for in the first part may fit naturally into the second. And once again the work is like a stream that flows ever onward.

The main interest in life and work is to become someone else

that you were not in the beginning.

Michel Foucault

5. Emotionality

When in 1995 Rudi Meulemans sought to add depth to his work, a new zest, he returned briefly to the tried and tested method from the start of his career: choosing existing writings and directing them so that questions regarding the writing itself moved into the background for a time.

In De Woestelingen he combined writings by Harold Pinter and Joe Orton. In the following project, called Marokko, about the relationship between the married writers Paul Bowles, a homosexual, and Jane Bowles, a lesbian, his ‘reflection’ already bore fruit. In fact, Marokko signalled the greater role played by emotionality in both his writing and directing. The actress Hilde Wils played an important part in this evolution.

6. Acting style

The ‘documentary’ work from the first period of De Parade was accompanied by an acting style based on a certain detachment: the actors’ involvement was of a rather intellectual nature; their acting presented a sort of comment on the writing. In the new way of writing, which started with Marokko and became especially clear as from Caravaggio (2002), the documentary biographic material was intertwined with more ‘fictional’ elements: these were things that do not belong in the biography but are, rather, taken in a barely noticeable way from the lives of the actors and the director; so in fact they do have a documentary and/or biographical nature but on some kind of secondary level.

The actors’ performance crosses the boundary too: it shifts from objectifying detachment towards emotional empathy. For example, in De knie van de voetballer, Pasolini’s voice is divided between three actors, in the later work a particular character’s lines are linked to just a single actor, while in the latest projects, Tom de Hoog, for example, corresponds to Caravaggio, Bacon and Mapplethorpe, or Hilde Wils to Jessie Lightfoot and Patti Smith. In the performance, Rudi Meulemans and his actors try above all to experience the here and now and also to share this sensation with their audience.

7. 'De Trilogie van het goede leven' and 'De Emigrés'

In parallel with this, Meulemans’ writing is evolving towards more unity, structure and purity; the early documentary projects, composed from a variety of material, were de facto fragmentary. In De Trilogie van het Goede Leven (comprising Caravaggio (2002) on the Italian painter, Life is all we have (2003) on the Irish painter Francis Bacon and Don’t touch here (2004) on the American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe) monologues and dialogues are fitted into clearly delineated, often ‘religiously tinted’ structures (triptych, the stations of the cross, etc.) and repetition and references in the script are used in an almost musical manner.

After De Trilogie van het Goede Leven, Meulemans once again arranged a period of reflection for himself as a writer: in 2005 he created De Emigrés, which he did not write himself, but was based on the book by the German writer W.G. Sebald. Sebald’s characters are also loners: refugees, voluntary or involuntary exiles and so by definition uprooted, people who do not belong anywhere. The nature of Sebald’s characters is deliberately ambiguous (are they fictional and/or real people?) and thus effortlessly connects with the compositional interplay of real and imagined facts that Meulemans generates in his own plays. However, the main challenge in De Emigrés lay in the actors’ confrontation with the richness of Sebald’s language, with its complicated sentences full of detailed descriptions and nuanced reflections.

‘... that according to me there are two ways philosophers can help us

in the question of the good life.

One is to engage in detailed questions into one’s personal life,

looking at choices, the role played by emotions, etc.

Since people do not achieve the good life on their own,

there is also another completely different way,

by talking about the structure of just political institutions.

It seems to me that the philosopher has a part to play in both cases.’

Martha Nussbaum

8. The Habsburgers

The characters Meulemans focuses on in his plays are always on the margins of society. But even though the actual subject is these people’s biography, their life and work, there is always a political element, which is inevitable if one is talking about the marginal; in such plays as Amerikaanse Dromen, Mann and Hoop en Glorie (2002), the political element even becomes the main thrust of their dramatic development. Sebald’s emigrants were people on the run throughout Europe, as a result of war, racism, banishment and so on. In the new four-part project following De Emigrés, Meulemans starts out from the decline of the Habsburg Empire in order to unfold for us the history and current social condition of Europe.

In the first part of the cycle, Starnberg (2006), the characters include Sisi, empress of Austria, and Ludwig II, King of Bavaria, and also Romy Schneider and Helmut Berger, who played these royals on film: the decadent ‘acted’ life of the doomed aristocracy and the tinsel world of illusion of the 20th-century film set appear to display many similarities. The protagonists in these two worlds come to grief in the same way as a result of deception and self-deception.

9. Swing

Before starting on the second part of the Habsburg cycle, which is based on the ill-fated lives of Maximilian and Charlotte, emperor and empress of Mexico, Meulemans first created a play called Swing (2006).

This play is based on two main elements: the American jazz music of the nineteen-thirties and forties and the ongoing racial discrimination whose victims were the black population in general and black swing musicians in particular. These two main themes are presented by three outside narrators. So the black musicians do not tell about their own lives; their story is told for them. By changing the narrative perspective, Meulemans immediately broadens the focus from the individual lives of the musicians to the social context that defines their lives. As a result, the ‘political portrait’ of an historical period comes to the foreground in addition to the personal biography of these marginalised artists. The narrators speak not only about the musicians and their compositions but also about the political problems of their era.

10. Coda

Rudi Meulemans, ‘I do not want to take up a moralistic position, condemning things, but rather the opposite: I want to show possibilities, show those unfamiliar things that often have the finger pointed at them. Political interest is a way of giving shape to your anger and steering it in a particular direction. I don’t like the theatre of the grand gesture, so in fact there is no place for anger depicted on stage. Nevertheless, I do want to express this anger, which is against, among other things, the fear on which many political decisions are based. The prohibition of pornography, for example, is based only on the fear of pornography. I often write about people who release their aggression in art and sublimate it in creativity. Caravaggio, Francis Bacon and Robert Mapplethorpe, the leading characters in The Trilogy of the Good Life, all do this. I took this subtitle from ‘the philosophy of the good life’ about which the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum and others have written. It is about finding an empathy with which to make the unfamiliar familiar. These three people (Caravaggio, Bacon, Mapplethorpe) have achieved ‘the good life’, by intertwining life and work, by shifting their own boundaries. Perhaps what ‘the good life’ means is: the convergence of life and work, and the peace you find therein because you feel you are doing well. In this sense I do not see the art as an escape, nor as a consolation, but as a provider of insight, whereby you are better able to cope with life and deal with your problems.’

“If I ever believed that the dead could hear me

and if I knew that the dead could not speak,

I was nonetheless certain that I could re-create a conversation with them.

Even when I came to understand

that in my most intense moments of straining to listen

all I could hear was my own voice,

even then I did not abandon my desire.

It was true that I could hear only my own voice,

but my own voice was the voice of the dead,

for the dead had contrived to leave textual traces of themselves,

and those traces make themselves heard in the voices of the living.

Many of the traces have little resonance,

though every one, even the most trivial or tedious,

contains some fragment of lost life;

others seem uncannily full of the will to be heard.”

Stephen Greenblatt