I experienced by far one of the most impressive theatre experiences of my life on Friday 5 August 2016. I was a guest at 'Zvizdal - Chernobyl so far, so close' by the Flemish company Berlin, in co-production with Het Zuidelijk Toneel. I saw this 'documentary installation' in an empty factory hall in Den Bosch, where the work is a wonderful resting point in the otherwise bustling hustle and bustle of Festival Boulevard. The film, combined with live recordings of small models under the film screen, confronts you with the basics of what life and love is with unprecedented intensity.
Zvizdal is about three documentary makers' meeting with an elderly farming couple who were the only ones left behind in the 'exclusion zone', which was established in 1986 around the exploded nuclear power plant in Chernobyl. The area has been unfit for human habitation for centuries, yet Nadia and Petro have lived there for 30 years. The camera crew follows their life in total isolation for several years.
Relief
In these times, when the daily talk is about pensions, elderly care and whether we can maintain our standard of living, the performance was a breath of fresh air. A deeply moving breath of fresh air, that is. I saw two people who, as a married couple, had more wisdom about life, love and what the world actually is, than I have ever experienced. Two people, with no running water, no electricity, no means of communication and no neighbours in an empty world, who found their own mini society, with a cow, a horse, a dog and a cat.
The audience was deeply impressed, the snickering was unrelenting. Not that it always has to be about snickering, but all the one hundred and eighty people who sat with me at this performance learnt something essential about what this life of ours is really about. And it's also essential that I don't give away the end of the story. You have to make sure you experience this.
Group tour
Afterwards, I spoke to two of the creators: Yves Degryse and Cathy Blisson. I wanted to know how you do it: making something like that. It turns out to be a matter of long breath, they tell me. Cathy, now a dramaturge but then a theatre critic for a Parisian magazine, travelled with a group of journalists and artists in 2009 through the forbidden zone around the exploded Chernobyl reactor, on the border of Belarus and Ukraine. The area the size of the entire province of South Holland, rendered forever uninhabitable by the enormous radioactivity released in the 1986 disaster and still released from the leaking 'sarcophagus' built over the molten core.
'Cathy Blisson: 'We were looking for abandoned buildings and villages. One of the members of our group went down a side road, and suddenly ran into Petro a few hundred metres away. He called me in. That encounter made a deep impression. I sensed then that it was a story that went beyond the story about Chernobyl. It was much more about how they were in life, about what time meant in their lives. For me, it became a metaphor about life itself and about how we ourselves deal with adversity and love.' '
'Yves Degryse: 'I only knew Cathy from phone interviews. We first spoke live in Paris while we were there with another project. And there she told me about her meeting with Petro and Nadia. Pretty soon then, we decided to start working on it.''
Smallest door
Wijbrand Schaap: What makes these two creators so suitable to do this very project?
'Cathy Blisson: 'They've been working on a big project, the Holocene Project, for a few years now. That consists of them going to a place and digging up stories. And their method is that they go in through the smallest possible door, to come out to the biggest possible story that there is to tell. These are always stories about how our world is changing, and the dynamics behind it.''
'Yves Degryse: 'We come from a theatre background. Like a theatre director picks a text, we pick a city. We treat it like a director treats a theatre text. We want to tell more than just the story of that city itself. We don't plan that much. Every project, every visit to a city actually automatically leads to the next project. For example, when we had worked in Jerusalem for a year, it seemed perfectly logical to start all over again completely empty after that, so we went to the North Pole. It's a combination of plan and intuition.'
'For the story about Nadia and Petro, we did have a plan, but we couldn't anticipate much. It's different anyway when you talk with and camera in between, or just 'live'. We also didn't know the whole story yet. We only knew they were 84 years old when we first got there. we planned to visit them once a year, in different seasons. We assumed we would do that for three years. We didn't plan that it would end up taking five years and producing eighty hours of video material.'
Mushrooms
'The story was also impossible to plan. We couldn't call in advance, because there is no phone. Writing a letter, also impossible. So we always went there on spec and had to see if we could get to speak to them. Sometimes we had to wait for hours before there was time to have a conversation. We learned to adapt to their rhythm. Sometimes they would walk by while we were waiting in the garden, and say a few things, and walk on again. We had to follow that rhythm.'
'We stayed for a few days to a week each time. In the beginning, it felt like hell. You are aware of the invisible radiation all the time, but after a while it started to get used to it and the visits became more relaxed. You don't take it into account anymore. There is still radiation, but it varies from place to place. For us, it was a matter of not eating all the food they offered us. Especially the mushrooms they grew, we had to take them in a friendly manner, and then dump them as soon as possible. The first few times we always went through a scanner afterwards, but then the dose of radiation wasn't too bad. Eventually that was no longer necessary, and we were only advised not to do risky things.''
'Cathy Blisson: 'As long as you don't spend your whole life there, the risk is manageable. If you live there daily, as they do, you do contract dangerous doses of radiation, but because they are already old, the symptoms develop very slowly. That is also why the protocols are changing. If something like Chernobyl happens again, they will not force the old people to leave. The trauma of having to move away from their native soil is much more serious than the damage they will suffer from the radiation.''
Concentrated
Wijbrand Schaap: Ultimately, the story is not about radiation and Chernobyl, but about two old people who are completely dependent on each other, and who are busy living apart from all modern conveniences.
'Yves Degryse: 'When you come there for so long, for a few years, you start to recognise more and more. Patterns, details. It tells you something about what it is like to live together, to depend on each other, while sometimes you also want to be alone. How much contact with others do you need to survive? How much stuff do you need to survive? With them, this is in a very concentrated place. They have lived in total isolation for 30 years. It's their personal life, it's hard to distance yourself from that.''
Wijbrand Schaap: The story also seems very theatrical. I was reminded of Chekhov's play The Cherry Garden, especially about the end of that play, when the old servant Firs is left forgotten in the locked house as the estate comes to an end.
'Yves Degryse: 'There is a lot of poetry in the way Nadia and Petro talk. They are very characteristic sentences, and the thought of Chekhov does indeed loom large. There is also a lot of emptiness in Chekhov, a lot of waiting, a lot of philosophy in very earthly things.''
Script
Wijbrand Schaap: Walking out of the room, I heard someone say that she thought they were actors, or that the story was pre-written.
'Cathy Blisson: 'That really would have been impossible. We never knew how they would react, what they would say, we also never knew in advance when and if we would meet them, and how it would be with them, whether they would be alive. There's no way you can figure that out or prescribe that in advance.''
'Yves Degryse: 'That's exactly what happens when you go so deep into non-fiction. The deeper you go, the stranger it becomes, and the more it starts to look like fiction, like something made up. That's why for me it's also theatre and not and documentary.''
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