A PUB AS MICROCOSM

Maja Westerveld reflects

by Sara Vanderieck, Fri, Oct 27, 2023

Schemer Toneelrepetitiebeeld 9

It’s night. You’d hear the distant storm approaching, if the music wasn't so loud. Inside the pub, the curtains artfully keep reality at bay. It smells of stale beer, air freshener, sweat and cigarette smoke. The floor is sticky with spilled drinks and trampled ambitions. But make no mistake: the air here vibrates with a boisterous zest for life. With mischievous looks, tall tales and newfound resolve. While the outside world races by at a relentless pace, here in this pub people sing and dance, mourn and celebrate with every fiber of their being. Come on in.

Schemer tells the story of a pub. A microcosm with, as its beating heart: a jukebox. The magical light-up music box with mysterious inner workings and an eclectic assortment of songs. If you drop in a coin, you momentarily get to dictate how this microcosm sounds. And also, a little bit how it feels. Until dusk falls. The day fades into night. The people go home, the curtains are drawn. As reality quietly fades away, the dream takes over, impervious to logic, rules and authority. No matter how hard you press the buttons, the mechanics of the dream remain unfathomable and this twilight cannot be controlled with any coin.

Director Maja Westerveld studied playwriting in the Netherlands. After graduating, she ended up at the Rotterdams Wijk Theater, where she got her first taste of participatory theater. She was inspired by the passion of the performers and that has stayed with her. She studied directing in Brussels, did her internship at Abattoir Fermé and has remained associated with the company as a maker. Abattoir Fermé recently merged with JazzLab and Kunstencentrum nona and Maja is the house artist at nona.

'Opera Ballet Vlaanderen approached me with the idea of creating a participatory performance with residents of Antwerp, Mechelen and Ghent. The starting point was: ‘We’re making a performance, who wants to join us?’ The only requirement: enthusiasm and willingness to work hard. Seventy people responded. A diverse collection of individuals. Some performers are appearing on stage for the first time in Schemer, others are seasoned amateurs. At the first meeting, the players are asked to introduce themselves. They can choose how: using a song, a drawing, a photo, a piece of text, anything. What follows is procession of more than seventy brave, magical, disarming individuals, sometimes shaking in their boots. One by one, with utter dedication. Everybody tirelessly continues to applaud each other. I fall in love with the cast. And when the choir joins the rehearsals and introduces itself with a song, I’m instantly smitten. It’s at some point in those rehearsals that I decide: if we’re going to sing about life, then let’s pull out all the stops.'

'At the initial rehearsals, I mainly looked at who the people were during the coffee breaks, as they arrived on their bike, and how they went home. What kind of chemistry is there between all those individuals and what charisma do we have in our midst?'
SCHEMER Repetitiebeeld 3
Repetitiebeeld Schemer - ByWM

Since February 2023, we have been rehearsing every Saturday in separate groups per city, and one Sunday a month all together. First off, I determine the setting: a pub at twilight. And then, there are ideas, fascinations, desires of what I would like to see. I convert these into scenes, run them by the players and construct the performance based on the results. That’s how the parallel between the cast and the jukebox came about. The cast as a magical instrument, a mechanism consisting of countless inscrutable cogs, but put a coin in and something beautiful comes out.

Schemer is not the kind of participatory performance where I literally work from the stories of the players or tell something about their real-life experiences. I love theatricality, fantasy, the magic on stage that starts as soon as the house lights go down. And I like authentic people. At the initial rehearsals, I mainly looked at who the people were during the coffee breaks, as they arrived on their bike, and how they went home. What kind of chemistry is there between all those individuals and what charisma do we have in our midst? Much of the material arises from improvisation. Sometimes it's the way someone moves that creates a spark, sometimes the sound of someone's laugh, or the costume that players choose to rehearse in.

Schemer Toneelrepetitiebeeld 11
Repetitiebeeld Schemer - ByWM

A story gradually emerges. Not a coherent, chronological narrative because that's not how the world works and that would be boring. But slivers, shards, fragments that have overlapping content on an intuitive level and together form a narrative. Those story fragments are marshalled by the music. You can only show the day by virtue of the night, so when we sing about life, I start with O Death by Ralph Stanley. During rehearsals we give the participants a playlist, and from there, the players themselves add suggestions. This is a collection of music that is somehow related to dying, death and hell, interspersed with great odes and bombastic hymns. Music directors Isaak Duerinck and Joris Derder and composer Laurens Mariën set to work with that mountain of material. In this way, the musical universe of the performance grows organically.

Louis Verlinde, the costume designer, is involved in every rehearsal from the start and makes a point of finding the ultimate look for each character. What starts with one rack of rehearsal costumes ends in painstaking puzzling, searching, trying on and trying out. Until everyone's character is right, and all players feel good about it. These are - because everyone plays a double role - a total of 152 costumes, put together with costume stock, new pieces made by the workshop, and many trips to thrift stores.

Scan mboussery 2023 08 28 16 05 12 4

All this material needs to be streamlined. To get a grip on the profusion, for each scene, I draw a picture that shows at a glance which world we are in, which characters are walking around in it, what music is playing, and a rough sketch of the lighting. Then I mash all those elements through the Schemer sieve. With those drawings as a backbone and dramaturges Maarten Boussery and Sara Vanderieck as sounding board, we have been methodically rehearsing the finished performance in recent weeks. It’s hard work, because I place no different demands on these players than on professional actors. The bar is just as high, but the outcome is different: authentic. They are the most transparent mirror of that world out there and they are absolutely irreplaceable. Take a single performer out of that fabric and the performance changes.

'I always come back to the same answer to the question: what do you want to express? Stories. About the world, out of this world and together with the world.'
Scan mboussery 2023 08 28 16 05 12 5

A story gradually emerges. Not a coherent, chronological narrative because that's not how the world works and that would be boring. But slivers, shards, fragments that have overlapping content on an intuitive level and together form a narrative. Those story fragments are marshalled by the music. You can only show the day by virtue of the night, so when we sing about life, I start with O Death by Ralph Stanley. During rehearsals we give the participants a playlist, and from there, the players themselves add suggestions. This is a collection of music that is somehow related to dying, death and hell, interspersed with great odes and bombastic hymns. Music directors Isaak Duerinck and Joris Derder and composer Laurens Mariën set to work with that mountain of material. In this way, the musical universe of the performance grows organically.

Louis Verlinde, the costume designer, is involved in every rehearsal from the start and makes a point of finding the ultimate look for each character. What starts with one rack of rehearsal costumes ends in painstaking puzzling, searching, trying on and trying out. Until everyone's character is right, and all players feel good about it. These are - because everyone plays a double role - a total of 152 costumes, put together with costume stock, new pieces made by the workshop, and many trips to thrift stores.

All this material needs to be streamlined. To get a grip on the profusion, for each scene, I draw a picture that shows at a glance which world we are in, which characters are walking around in it, what music is playing, and a rough sketch of the lighting. Then I mash all those elements through the Schemer sieve. With those drawings as a backbone and dramaturges Maarten Boussery and Sara Vanderieck as sounding board, we have been methodically rehearsing the finished performance in recent weeks. It’s hard work, because I place no different demands on these players than on professional actors. The bar is just as high, but the outcome is different: authentic. They are the most transparent mirror of that world out there and they are absolutely irreplaceable. Take a single performer out of that fabric and the performance changes.

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