doctoral research at Kask/School of Arts and the University of Ghent (2017-2024)
a summary.
Fragility
This research explores a specific quality of spectatorship, in which spectators become aware of the agency they have over the situation proposed to them.
The setting of this research is the enclosed space of the theatre, but it also expanded into the great outdoors of the world beyond.
It departs from a series of performances created prior to this research, in which the audience, in one way or another, is confronted with a form that is fragile or placed in a situation that appears fragile. Because of this fragility, they become aware that they have agency over what is happening.
Balthazar A performance staging five human performers and an animal performer, a donkey. They form a group. The show relies on horizontal, non-hierarchical communication between species, engaged in a choreography: walking together. At times, the donkey perfectly follows what the humans propose to him or her; at other times, he or she shows no interest at all. Both moments are funny. The audience laughs. The donkey looks back. At this moment, the audience realises that they play a role in what is happening.
The Guardians of Sleep Performers attempt to fall asleep for and in front of spectators. The spectators literally become the guardians of this sleep. In an intense proximity with the sleepers, they are aware that each move they make is acknowledged by them, almost as if they were lying in the same bed.
Tonight, Lights Out! Each member of the audience holds a switch connected to a light bulb. The bulbs hang randomly from the ceiling and illuminate the space. A challenge is proposed to the audience: to collectively produce darkness and spend time in the dark together, doing nothing. Each member of the audience must switch off, or keep off, their light in order to create this collective moment in darkness. A consensus must be achieved, because if a single bulb remains lit, the entire space remains illuminated.
Withdrawal
What is proposed to the spectators — the performance — is fragile. Because of this fragility, they become aware of their agency. They are even made responsible for it, or asked to care for it. This is fundamentally an ecological situation, as it embeds relationality into the artwork itself.
This awareness can be seen as an actualisation (or a manifestation) of the Anthropocene within the theatre. In this context, I use the term Anthropocene not so much as a geological epoch, but rather as a form of awareness: the recognition that, as humans, we have agency — and even responsibility — with regard to every phenomenon we encounter. The term Anthropocene is a difficult one, because it universalises the human experience. Who is this Anthropos?
Politically, the term Capitalocene might be more appropriate.
In the case that interests me, I deliberately keep the Anthropos. The spectators are the humans, who, by their mere presence, have agency and responsibility over what is happening. What happens in a theatre when spectators are confronted with fragility? How does it affect them? What agency do they have over the situation?
In the forms I propose, it is as if they need to withdraw their agency from the situation for it to unfold (the donkey, the sleepers…). The spectator must actively do as little as possible. In order to be fully there, they must somehow be there as little as possible. It is a kind of anti-participation — a kind of not-doing that becomes a gesture of care, or of responsibility.
I have explored this in various forms. And because I have done this in theatres — and not in churches or temples — this imperative of care or responsibility potentially creates frictions or dissent within the collective of spectators.
For example, in Tonight, Lights Out!, where there are as many light sources as spectators, the challenge is to arrive at total darkness. If even one light remains lit, there is no darkness. An almost impossible consensus is demanded of the audience. This fragility is not only something between spectator and artwork, but also something installed within the collective of spectators.
The Sublime
From the very beginning, one concept has run like a thread through this research: the sublime — and with it, the question of how the experience of the sublime is challenged by the Anthropocene. Traditionally, the sublime is understood as the encounter — in a safe environment — with something that holds the power to annihilate you completely (Christine Battersby). Such an encounter generates an ambivalent feeling: a mixture of terror and joy, fascination and repulsion, as described in the Burkean tradition.
If we follow French philosopher Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, in today’s world, humans are confronted daily with natural catastrophes: wildfires, floods, droughts, the collapse of entire ecosystems. Some live through these events directly; others consume them endlessly through media exposure. In a sense, the sublime has become omnipresent. It has become the dominant aesthetic of the Anthropocene.
And yet someone like Bruno Latour might argue that what Fressoz names the sublime is no longer truly the sublime.
For two closely entangled reasons: the spectator of the sublime must remain outside of what is unfolding — and must feel safe. In the Anthropocene, neither of these conditions holds. We are no longer distant observers; we are always implicated in what is happening. And we are no longer safe.
Thus, the sublime seems to be everywhere, and yet it is perhaps no longer an experience we can truly have.
It is almost as if the situation has been reversed.
Where the Romantic sublime staged the smallness of the human against the vastness of nature, today we find ourselves facing something else: an overwhelming humanity confronted by the fragility of the living, a fragility that sends back violent and repeated echoes. In the traditional sublime, the structure was one-sided: the artwork exercised its authority over the spectator, overpowering them, making them aware of their own smallness and vulnerability.Now, in the ecological age we inhabit, the movement has become reciprocal.
In the sensitive space of the theatre, I propose to downsize the aesthetic experience.
I develop a strategy in which fragility changes sides: it is no longer the spectator who is fragile, but the artwork itself.
The individual spectator — and the community of spectators gathered together — become aware that they hold the power to damage, even to annihilate, the situation unfolding before them. Thus, what emerges is a kind of reverse sublime — or a fragile sublime — one that summons gestures of care and responsibility. It signals a shift: from aesthetics to ethics.
I am not a theoretician. I am an artist.
The concepts and theories I draw upon are not ends in themselves, but points of departure, impulses for practice.
Can this fragile sublime still be called a sublime?
Perhaps that is not the question.
What matters more — in the spirit of Nicolas Bourriaud — is to understand this downsizing of aesthetic experience, this withdrawal, this reversal of the sublime, as a training ground: a space where we might model and rehearse the relationality needed to respond to the ecological emergency — and further, to imagine and enact ecological futures.
This research has unfolded on different levels, and through different means.
Inside the theatrical space, I created performances, gave lectures, curated projects, and worked within research laboratories. Outside the theatrical space, I developed a creative writing practice and invited others to write alongside me.
Ultimately, I presented two outcomes to the examination commission: the fifth edition of the series of performance-conferences On Enclosed Spaces and The Great Outdoors — 5. Exercising Fragility in Theatres and Beyond, and a text carrying the same title.
Both reflect the heterogeneity of this research. Whether in the form of a performance-conference or a book, the attempt remains: to let artistic propositions — performances, a concert, literary texts, descriptions of situations — correspond with theoretical reflections in a horizontal, non-hierarchical way, and to see what kind of discourse, but also what kind of experience, might emerge from their confrontation.
The Covid-19 pandemic played an important role in this research.
Before the pandemic, I had been working inside theatres, creating fragile, precarious situations — moments flirting with the brink of the uncontrollable — that activated a sense of care and responsibility in those who witnessed them.
Then, from one day to the next, something shifted at a planetary scale:
we all became dangerous for one another — and therefore fragile.
All fragile. All dangerous.
Theatres closed. We were asked to stay at home.
It seemed that what I had carefully staged within the protected walls of theatres had now spilled into the world outside.
In a way, this was a moment of emancipation from the theatre.
First, I created an online version of the performance The Guardians of Sleep.
Then, I began to write situations.
From March 2020 onward, I imagined and wrote scenarios similar to those I had created within theatres — but now set outside of those enclosed spaces, situated in a ‘real’ fictional life.
Writing became a way to move beyond the physical theatre and to move closer to the core of the situations I wanted to create — blurring the boundary between being a spectator of an artwork and being a spectator of life.
Through this practice, I also explored the difference between reading and witnessing: between the position of a reader and that of an audience member.
From this radical moment of closure, a new opportunity emerged. It became possible to reflect, collectively, on the future — on the “world beyond” (“le monde d’après”).
On April 8, 2020, at the height of the lockdown, I wrote an email to colleagues working in performance and theatre. I asked them to describe their first imagined visit to the theatre after the lockdown. This became the starting point of and then the doors open again — a project that gave rise to a book compiling all the responses I received, and a series of workshops, walks, and conversations carried out across different contexts and cities.