Yves Degryse (Berlin) on the return of the legendary show 'Zvizdal' at #Theaterfestival Boulevard: "This really took me by my jacket"

Yves Degryse is one of the people behind the extraordinary Flemish company Berlin. Between 2011 and 2015, Berlin worked on the performance Zvizdal, largely shot in the 'forbidden zone' around the exploded Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. I saw the performance in 2016 in Den Bosch, during Festival Boulevard, and was 'blown away'. This year, he returns to Boulevard with this legendary theatrical documentary, in which we meet two very elderly lovers living in one of the most radioactive places in the world. We talk about that performance, which did not leave him cold:

"It did change our way of working a lot. We were so close to them and I learnt so much from that calmness that those two exuded in such a situation. And their humour too. That will stay with me forever: the relativity of things. And that, even after thirty years, that same silly joke still works. The connection between the two: love. Or what is that then, that love? This really rattled me, really took me by the jacket. Looking back, I also see a lot happened in that period. In my own life too, so then I think yes, something did coincide there after all."

Listen to the podcast,

and also hear there how Degryse thinks about his new job, as a member of the artistic direction of NTGent, starting next season.

Read the edited transcript of the podcast here:

Wijbrand Schaap

Yves, you are one of the people behind Berlin. The company with little to compare, which has been pioneering documentary art since 2003. It's also called theatre, but I always find that difficult to call just theatre because it's a lot of video and model building and environment building, which is what you guys do. So it's it's more than that to me.

We talk about two things. Your coming to Den Bosch with Zvizdal, a play from 2016. And your entry into the gallery of honour of Belgian theatre, namely: you are taking over NTGent, the company where Johan Simons and Milo Rau held the sceptre. More on that later.
We are going to start talking about Zvizdal. I saw the performance, 2016, I think, and was quite staggered by it at the time. I liked m very much. We also spoke to each other then. I will also link that interview on the site, so the all the things we discussed there, we don't have to go back to all that exactly, because people can just read that, in two languages nowadays, which is also very nice.

You are his regular on Boulevard, as I have secretly seen a lot more of you there anyway. A performance that turned out to be a participation night about getting older, I think. At the time, I didn't even know you guys were.

Yves Degryse

Yes, that was also something exceptional. It was made especially for Boulevard at the time.

Wijbrand Schaap

Well, that. It was a public participation evening with no people, just microphones. When was it again that year?

Yves Degryse

It has since been three years. It was one in one of the boxes, then in the square. It was more of a radio play in a scenic setting about the formation of an association that was looking into ageing, whether it was really necessary for everyone to get so old. You could join that.

Wijbrand Schaap

There was also a most remarkable performance that you made about art forgeries in which there was still some disquiet with Mira Feticu, the writer who was put on a trail by you to a hidden treasure in Romania.

Yves Degryse

The case involved a stolen Picasso, Tête d'Arlequin stolen from the Kunsthal in Rotterdam in 2012, about which there were many question marks over the painting's whereabouts. In any case, it had been stolen by a group of Romanians who were later arrested, but it was unclear because the mother of one of the perpetrators, had burned the seven masterpieces that were stolen in her wood stove, out of panic to protect her son. Lab tests revealed that at least three of those seven masterpieces had been burnt anyway.

The other four are actually a question mark to this day and I then asked Geert Jan Jansen, the master forger, to make an exact copy of Picasso's Tête d'Arlequin. We then put it there in our backpack, took it by plane to Romania and hid it in a forest near where the perpetrators live and sent anonymous letters with the location.

It was an investigation. It was part of the show about the master forger Geert-Jan Jansen, and in that show there is a little line about that investigation. What if you are in a museum? You look at work. You are moved by it. And someone whispers in your ear: 'It's a fake or a forgery'. Everything drops as a result: the emotional value, financial value, and so on. How does it come about? How come? Why are we so attached to the real thing? So it fitted into that performance to try to get Pablo Picasso's temporary back into Rotterdam's Kunsthal, without anyone knowing it was a fake. That we could enjoy Picasso again, without the knowledge of a forgery.

It's quite the discussion about money in a forgery, because a lot of those conversations I've had with gallery owners and art auctions are obviously about the emotional value, but very often go back to money. Ultimately, if you bite long enough to take that element away from Geert-Jan Jansen as well and say, 'Look, do you want to make that for us, with no financial arrangements around that or, money is not an issue and this in the sense that there is no money involved?' So what happens when you take away that discussion point?

There was a camera hanging in the forest. I had also hung up that camera, so we got the footage in Belgium and Antwerp in our studio. And after a few weeks, Mira indeed appeared with Frank Westerman, the writer who had not received a letter, but who had gone with Mira. So I only read in the paper a few hours later that it was Frank Westerman. But it could also have turned out that Mira had gone to an expert with the forgery. And then some things would have become clear, after a few days I think.

Here the difference was that small videos were made immediately, which were forwarded to NOS from the hotel. Within 12.00h, the news had appeared in 18 countries, in newspapers and on television and so on. And did we also decide the day after when one expert and I if I remember correctly an afternoon news programme on NOS or a radio news programme. One expert who said: 'Yes, I haven't seen it yet, the work, but I see from the pictures I'm getting through, I think there is something going on anyway'. And then we knew what time it was and that it might stop there. And we sent a letter and email to Frank Westerman and to Mira. Also to explain how this project worked. And well, that was it, the little communication I had with her about it. I did have a long talk with Frank Westerman. He also saw the performance in Ghent. More too, by the way. But yes. And that was a very eventful period. For Mira in the first place, I think for us in another way too.

Wijbrand Schaap

Because she was not happy with that performance?

Yves Degryse

With the performance, I actually don't know. I didn't with her... Frank was very enthusiastic about it. He came to see couple once also in Amsterdam. Myra was not happy with the action in any case, to say the least.

Wijbrand Schaap

But you continued with the show, because I saw that it is or has been on a world tour.

Yves Degryse

Of course, now it sounds a bit like that performance is about that action in Romania. We are playing right now, by the way, here in Ostend at Theater aan Zee. A longer series. If you were to ask anybody in the audience who comes out after the performance, nobody is going to talk about Romania. That's a very small line in that performance. The subject is obviously Geert-Jan, but the subject is mainly the value we attach to truth. Why are we so attached to it? And when does fiction become a gift in it, or what is that boundary in between? Why do we need it so much, those themes?

Wijbrand Schaap

Well that's an interesting theme in your work. In The making of Berlin was about an and alleged or otherwise plan by a Berliner to hold a kind of zoom concert avant la lettre in various cellars of Berlin in the last months of World War II. There was also that element of truth and falsity in that where you may have actually been somewhat led astray yourselves.

Yves Degryse

Whether it haunts us I don't know, but it is a theme. Exploring that fiction/non-fiction and those lines between the two. It hasn't always been that way. That theme has come to creep in there. So we started a documentary series once in 2003, the city cycle: portraits of cities with the intention of choosing a discipline and going to a city each time for a longer time, working on a project for a year, living there for a few months.

We didn't want to pin ourselves down to a particular discipline, even though our background was theatre. Above all, we wanted to look. Just as another director chooses a text, we chose a city. Or did we choose that set in a city? And that's where the de the need then gradually arose to be able to intervene more. That makes sense, of course, if you start in Jerusalem. They are such strong testimonies there. If you do good research, you have very strong testimonies there. Interpretations of an opinion, very diverse of course, very confusing, but which are enough to make it exist on its own.

The need to intervene exists in finding the form how to show it. And not so much in the content in the choices, well in the editing, but not to put forward my personal opinion in it. That opinion is in the choice, of course. From a montage, you always make choices. Nothing to do about it. But no matter how brave you want to do it or how clean, or you make choices. Yes, and that did shift over time through certain encounters with people, including Gert-Jan Jansen who we had known for much longer than before True Copy. But that truth, so that need, did gradually creep into the performances, because fiction elements our theatre background to slide in more anyway.

Then we also decided to start a second cycle and and start from smaller stories rather than an entire city as a starting point. Rather a story within that city, within a particular region or town. Yes, it was actually started by Perhaps All the Dragons, a show featuring thirty short filmed interviews with people with unlikely but true stories on the occasion of our tenth anniversary. Notes we made. This has toured about 20 countries in that time and you meet a lot of people. Encounters, good stories, just not deep enough to make a full representation of that, but very interesting. And we collected all those interviews into one table project with true stories, but still unlikely to hear. Among them was one story that was not true, that we had completely made up. That's how that game kind of evolved. That's why we also met Geert Jan, the master forger, and that was actually such a uhm yes, with Geert Jan you don't just meet.

It's quite a bit of searching how to do that then and are we going to write that text for him or not. For me, there was kind of a synthesis with what we were doing that blending of fiction and non-fiction, the acceptance of a story or taking it as the truth. And that's where the idea emerged. We are going to do a full-length performance with Geert Jan.

Wijbrand Schaap

Yes. Yes, that that fiction/non-fiction idea has obviously haunted you somewhat. I also saw from the audience reactions that the interview we had in 2016, that there were also people who thought about Zvizdal that they were actors, the two oldies you follow there.

Yves Degryse

Yes, I get that question retrospectively now when we play somewhere. Especially since the latest projects True Copy and The making of Berlin deal with those themes of fiction non-fiction. Programmers of theatres asking: 'please don't tell me those two were actors'. But no so. Then I would consider myself a bit sick of letting it come to that. It's not about the play either. The fiction/non-fiction concerns True Copy and The Making of...made that very clear. Zvizdal is really about those two elderly people living there in that isolated area. So no, I wouldn't do it to anyone. I wouldn't do it to myself to make something like that either.

Wijbrand Schaap

Just in your own words what is Zvizdal? Because I'll do a quick description anyway so people don't have to read the whole interview first. You spent about five years in the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. How did this come about?

Yves Degryse

It originated with a French journalist, Kathy Bryson, who had been writing about us for several years but whom I had never met myself. Live though via phone interviews. She had been writing reviews of our work when we played in France and at some point she stopped being a critic and started doing more dramaturgical work. She called me at one point when we were playing in Paris to meet up, and explained to me that they had gone with a group of scriptwriters or dramaturgs with a writers' residency to the Chernobyl area, got lost in a car there at one point and were in the forbidden zone. Because, of course, you have the official checkpoints around the forbidden zone.

But there are also minor roads. We also took those for the first 2.5 years because we didn't get permission. There are also small roads through the forest that you can take and on one such road they ended up rather by chance and got lost and she was there with her translator and they suddenly see a man standing on the road. Who obviously came from there. And he very surprised at them she about him. They get talking. It turned out that he and his wife Nadia were the only ones still living in the village of Zvizdal in the forbidden zone and that they had refused to be evacuated.

That was 25 years ago at that time and they survived without running water, without electricity and even then they were old and they were 86 when we stopped filming, so they were 81 when we started filming. That prompted us to do that, after she spoke to us in Paris because she knew our work so well. We wanted to make a project about that, but didn't have an immediate idea. which entrance or where would we go there? We said okay, we'll fly there once and meet them and then we'll see. We did that, but of course it is impossible to write Pedro and Nadia a letter: 'We are this and that and we are coming.'

You can't check anything, you just have to take the plane. We drove four hours, hoping you don't get caught by the police, and then going to the house and then hoping they are there. So first of all the hope always in those five years we filmed there, always that same hope and fear. Are they alive or will we find something? Yes, it can go either way when you go there. We spoke to them then, once and that was immediately that feeling. Yes, that's such an insane portrait, those two alone.

Very quickly, it is no longer about Chernobyl. It doesn't really have anything to do with it anymore. It always has something to do with it. So it's there just like the radiation, but it's invisible. It's always there in the background, but you're not dealing with it on a daily basis. No, that is something you totally forget after a visit. Even or two, maybe the first two years we were really dealing with that. Except for the big things. I will never eat a piece of meat made there. She also offered us mushrooms several times. Yes, now that's really the last thing to do of course.

But then we did quickly decide, 'OK, we will do a project, but it will be over several years.'

Wijbrand Schaap

Because you followed them for five years. Yes, and even after that, in my opinion, as a person. Or am I giving something away now? It has become an incredibly impressive and penetrating portrait of love and of loneliness. And of, well, life. How has it changed your outlook on life?

Yves Degryse

Yes, it has a price for me. For me personally, it has changed a lot especially on a personal level. It has become a very personal project. It sounds a bit gratuitous. Of course, it's easy to say that something is personal. But I can say that before that we worked with much more distance in relation to the people we interviewed. That did include people we saw several times back. More than the other interviews they were used to. That's about the project we made in Germany in the Ruhr region. In that project, it was absolutely not common for someone to say, after a first interview, 'We are going to come back three more times for the interviews', but there was always a kind of distance.

Wijbrand Schaap

But in Zvizdal that distance was no longer possible?

Yves Degryse

I experienced them as kind of grandparents anyway and that was not the intention. And I don't like that do I? Yep, sure, in hindsight I do. But I feel like OK wait, I have to keep thinking about a project and then things happen where you really have to think: 'Do we take the camera in this case or not?' I can't say much about it and for that you have to see the performance, but: 'Do we take the camera, then we will film.' Because you wonder whether that's going to a meeting with your grandparents or with the protagonists of your project.

That then becomes a thin line. And at the same time, that also becomes the strength of a project. You can feel that yourself when you are working, that we take a certain rest with them that is really necessary, also for the project. We have I don't know how many hours, I think about sixty hours, material and film for the project, but we also have a few hundred hours of waiting. Of not filming, Just waiting in the garden because we had an agreement not to film in their house and not to film in the yard, so to stay outside the fence. So yeah, then you sit in that backyard waiting until you hear the little door creak because they come outside and think okay, there they are.

They sometimes just pass the camera and walk to the forest to find food. And then again you have no interview or no picture. You can't really talk about an interview either. There is no thing of question and answer. There is an encounter and the camera is there at that moment and they thankfully stay around there for a bit and thankfully keep speaking for a bit longer than usual. They completely set the rhythm. So it did change our way of working a lot. We were so close to them and I learnt so much from that calmness that those two exuded in such a situation. And the humour too. That will stay with me forever: the relativity of things. But also humour, when even after thirty years, that same silly joke still works. The connection between the two, love. Or what is that then, that love? This really rattled me, really took me by the jacket. Looking back, I also see a lot happened in that period. In my own life too, so then I think yes, something did coincide there after all.

Wijbrand Schaap

Can you say anything more about it or is that too personal?

Yves Degryse

Yes, well, that's too personal.

Wijbrand Schaap

At least it managed to convey that to me as a viewer as well. After all, it is a performance you keep thinking back to. Below the screen are models filmed with small cameras. Nowadays, you might use drones for that, but fortunately that didn't happen.

Yves Degryse

Yes, we did film immediately in a period with a drone there on site. Yes, yes.

Wijbrand Schaap

I mean otherwise you might not have come up with the idea of those models.

Yves Degryse

Yes.

Wijbrand Schaap

But that combination of a model and that filming, that does give a kind of intangible added value. You can't see that in isolation.

Yves Degryse

The way it is made now, you can't separate it. We did often consider, still do actually, being able to make a one-screen documentary of the project. That is possible, but not how they are made now. It's in such a way that it's impossible to just let that film play out. Furthermore, it would also be really unnecessary, that form, but it's been a long search for the form. How do you translate that, such an intense project with them? And how do you translate the feeling of going there each time, hoping they are still alive and hoping they are there? But also the moment. We could never stay more than a week. Because of the radiation, you had to make sure you were gone after a week. We had been advised to leave the area after a week. In the beginning we were still checked in a scan in in Belgium, but after a few times we said: from then on it's completely okay.

But how do you translate that moment that you also leave them again? That you therefore step into their world again and again, but also leave them? So also at the moment when winter comes and know that everything ends? Now they are not accessible for several months. And you leave them behind.

And when should you intervene? That has also been one of the most personally profound moments, that at some point you have to decide: I will leave them behind, knowing that that might result in death. But it is their choice, even though they are from here. They are 86, so they choose. Yes, even if you say: 'I still think it would really be better to move to your daughter at Kiyv for the last few years.' So no. If that choice is made that hard, then we have to leave them behind. And that is something emotional. Very hard to deal with. Especially when you almost think of them as grandparents, and yet they give you some phrases that are defining for me, for the rest of my life.

So how do you then translate to form? It took a very long time for us to have that. But there have been a number of moments in those five years that where we obviously weren't there when we got there. And I can actually give just one example of it in terms of storyline at one moment there is a one cow and one horse. Cow and horse died and those were the only animals where they... Of course in our life it's details when a cow and a horse dies. Then if necessary you look for another cow and horse, but there you take away something essential. So for example, the moment those two animals died. That really was a turning point in their lives and consequently in the project. But we weren't there when that happened. So we are getting there. And yes. Two months ago or three months ago, I don't know how long it was, horse and cow died. What do you do with that? With those moments that are actually very important and have been lived from a distance and haven't actually been lived, but he just wasn't there and there's no contact.

And that a feeling such a petri dish. That's how it felt sometimes, looking at an object and examining, observing. And sometimes that also feels very awkward. Emotionally that you look so detached on that as a project. And so then came the idea: okay, if we as an audience can make those thoughts feel that those models are big petri dishes, and then magnify that. The stand is also on two sides. You are aware of the other person on the other side, looking at the same object as you. And then, of course, those three maquettes are ideal for letting things play out in there and filming them live and mixing them with documentary images for, say, the moments you didn't actually experience there. Or the passing of the seasons literally sliding through your camera. About those differences between three of the four seasons are depicted. There are three maquettes each showing the exact same living place their home, a farm in a different season.

And that's where that camera glides. So the passing of time, even with us, in those five years was much more about the seasons than the years. Peter is also not speaking in a time and is not talking about next year. He speaks of next summer or next autumn. I no longer think in time, I think in moments and had no idea of time.

Wijbrand Schaap

This form also means being at the show every day . I can also imagine that being difficult, now that you talk about how personal it is. Or intense?

Yves Degryse

Yes, intensely. I also notice... Enfin, that's still there, but that's a... a.... I am also super grateful that I was able to experience Nadia and Peter, that I was able to experience them there with the group. And at the same time, I also feel when I talk about her, because I had a connection with her, ...a very special click. I also find that in an after-show discussion after a performance, it's harder to talk about her. Yes, but that's also nice. It's also beautiful, that's what it's about. It's about that love.

Wijbrand Schaap

And it is now war. It was war in 2015, of course, but not yet close to it. How does that work through? You guys have been back yet?

Yves Degryse

We have not been back to Zvizdal. That has to do with what happens in the show, of course. But what it did have to do with was with Olga. Who lived near Kiev. Olga was our translator, our interpreter, a very young interpreter who went with us for five years. So we were really lucky that she was always there and they really considered her a granddaughter. I can speak to you, I have a grandparent feeling, but of course the language also gets in the way of things to really get to her. Not with Olga. She was really someone to them, their granddaughter who came to visit, you could tell from the dialogues they had. Yes, then it became very concrete.

She stayed until it became really too dangerous. Then Cathy and I also started sending messages to her, of, 'Yes, wouldn't you flee? Come here! Come to Paris or to Belgium, or to Antwerp!' But yes, she has a husband there. Who then also gets called up in the meantime. Who doesn't see that at all. The image of the heroic Ukrainian young fighter who absolutely wanted to take up arms and go fight at the front as soon as possible does not necessarily apply to everyone. There are also people who just think: 'I don't want to be part of this. I don't need to be part of it. It's not my...'

That is a very difficult conversation and then at one point it did become really too dangerous with the bombing of Kiev and she fled from there. She now lives in northern France for now. Without a husband here. Because her choice is natural. That is the closest thing to what we have experienced concretely with the people we know within the project.

Wijbrand Schaap

Yes. One a move, but does it change anything about where now re-bringing the projects so far is war? Does it change the way people watch is? And how does that work?

Yves Degryse

Yes, there is of course talk in that performance, in a totally different context about what is my land? What is my land? What is my home? About moving me or not. Petro says at one point: If you were to move me out of this zone, but with the context of Chernobyl disaster: 'All the people who evacuated died. We didn't.' And not all those people evacuated, of course. But he says: 'Some people adapt.' But move a tree that is too old to another place and it dies.'

And how long do you want to stick to a particular place? That was a choice Olga also had to make, in her flat near Kiev. What do I take with me, what do I leave behind. When do I leave? When do I decide that this may never be my place again? Yes, that has consequences.

So what is your love towards a place? Not towards each other, but towards where you come from or live. How do we relate to those roots? So those are obviously statements in that context that are coming back now.

That may fall on a very personal level of someone who has had to choose to leave or it may fall on a much larger political discussion. Which land belongs to whom? So those questions definitely come with it. We noticed it, the first time we played it. It was in a theatre that reacted very quickly of, I'm really not asking for cynical reasons. But I really want you guys to come and play like that. That was when the war was going on for six months. It doesn't change Peter and Nadia's relationship. Those are two characters who... Yes, this is also a love story. But there are a number of other lines attached to it now. From that little closed area there are now additional strings to that big outside world.

Wijbrand Schaap

Yes. Talking about the outside world. If we go to the other topic for a moment. Now you become NTGent's landlord. What was going through your mind?
Have you been asked?

Yves Degryse

No. Well, asked. It was a very long month-long procedure with 30 candidates, who responded to the vacancy. A very clear vacancy was written out with clear lines of what exactly is wanted in someone or several people. And then, of course, a procedure starts that is laid down in advance. So the de de jury interviews, assessments, and a very solid exercise you have to go through. The second interview with the jury. That exercise was a complete planning of the season 25/26 on all functions, so: creations, co-productions here in Belgium, the reception work, so the whole guest programme.

That's a whole procedure that actually takes you that entire month completely mentally. And just to be clear, we share artistic direction. We are going to do that with three? It's really a multi-part, multi-part artistic direction. So I'm going to take on artistic direction together with Barbara Melis. That's in a dual leadership with the business leadership within NTGent. That's on the same level, so to speak. That's an interaction group then. And so the story with Berlin Berlin becomes one of the house companies within NTGent there. There will be a number of house companies there, a number of artists in residence, including Miet Warlop who is also on Boulevard, our predecessor Milo Rau himself, Lara Staal.

Wijbrand Schaap

So you choose the model that Het Toneelhuis in Antwerp, under Guy Cassiers, had for a while. Is that comparable?

Yves Degryse

Yes, except of course Guy was the artistic director. NTGent was one of the last, by the way, to evolve from a players' ensemble to a makers' house. So of the three city theatres that exist in Flanders, in Ghent, Brussels and Antwerp, Ghent is actually the last one to disband the players' ensemble under Milo Rau? So that was quite late and with the necessary commotion around that.

Wijbrand Schaap

Yes, that's a big decision. Didn't thank him either.

Yves Degryse

Yes, that's a big break. That's a big change and that's evolved into a maker's ensemble of course. That ensures, such a maker ensemble, that it becomes much more diverse in terms of style and in terms of people, and by diverse I mean in many different areas. Also in style. What do we show where, what is made, how is it produced, what will tour? And that also requires a translation in artistic direction. So I personally would never have done that artistic direction alone. I don't think that suits the house full of multi-voiced makers.

And it also requires multi-voiced artistic direction, because you have very different and multiple questions to answer and multiple problems, multiple possibilities that you can have to deal with. And in that sense, we have really raised our profile as a creator and curators to be able to answer that multitude of questions that wide range of possibilities within a city theatre in enough breadth and depth.

For me, if I imagine it for myself, being in a house as an artistic director is very important and at the same time continuing, building on a very big international story. Yes, we should be able to make that spread. Working very internationally, but if that stands, also being connected enough to the city. You have to make enough projects in that city itself. That ensures that this way - when we put our three profiles together - we still thought we could make a good plan for NTGent.

Wijbrand Schaap

About that or that, that transition from a a company of actors with a lead and to creators, I also have questions about that. In Rotterdam, for instance, I notice that the connection with the city should often still come from the actors, shapers moving around in the humus layer of the city. That they live there and go to cafés, things like that, which gives them a connection with the city. And if you only have creators, then it becomes very hybrid and becomes very loose. Probably a bit of a kind of ZZP schap as it exists in the Netherlands. How do you ensure such a connection with such a city? More than a place, say a one, an artistic place.

Yves Degryse

If it is not in the plans then it is not going to come out. It just has to be in the idea from the start. It is not something that can be done afterwards. It's not going to happen by just planning some individual projects in the city then. From Berlin itself, it coincided with the plans out there for creation. The first bigger show I will make within Berlin is a project in the city. That was planned anyway without NTGent. So that already coincided. It is a life-size projection on the side wall of a flat block. As if you took away the facade and you see the interiors. The script is being written for six flats. I want the development of the script to start from interviews with residents of Ghent and interviews with NTGent staff and conversations with the other makers within the house.

Because you might as well ask whether you necessarily have to do all those flats yourself. It might be an opening to collaborate in that. So that's contained in those projects. Just the same with Barbara's line. Barbara was chief artistic officer of the Vooruit for many years, now 404 in Ghent and Buda in Kortrijk. She withdrew for several years and devoted herself entirely to training in England around farewells to life. She designs rituals, farewell rituals for moments society no longer provides for at the moment, since the church has fallen away. Faith, social cohesion is less strong.

People come to her practice to come up with a ritual for something they have had to say goodbye to. These can be very heavy things, but there can also be very light ones. With us, that's the first and solemn communion used to be in church. Yes, she came up with another ritual for that, when a child goes from nine to 10 they will never have a single digit in their age again and so a celebration arises around that. So you can make those moments into new moments. And she often works with artists and performers for that. That is the practice she has developed over the past seven years. Even bigger projects she is now going to open up more to a public thing. So she is going to co-implant art, care and rituals into our city theatre.

It goes in circles. Of course, first and foremost it is about caring for the people who work in your home, you have to pay attention to that, devise pathways for that The circle that comes around that is the circle with the city. It's about making the link to the people, the places. Also, as a teacher, we are going to come up with more curating of some frames where the encounter with the city and a city theatre is more involved.

Wijbrand Schaap

You are succeeding Milo Rau. Who came to Ghent and had a whole list of wishes, bids, demands that still needed some work. Have you...

Yves Degryse

The manifesto.

Wijbrand Schaap

...already have your Manifesto ready for for, for Ghent and the rest of the world?

Yves Degryse

We have too many plans ready to go. And very concrete ones too. But not in the form of a manifesto. Because that is a a physical thing. Milo Roth's manifesto hangs in the hall of the theatre. A large gold plate, engraved. Milo will remain artistic director until July next year. He will, of course, be there less physically because he is busy with the Wiener Festwochen, but he will remain the final person in charge if anything comes up. So until then, the manifesto will stick around. The upcoming season is also already fully planned by him and his team. We have now had initial discussions. For instance, there is an idea to maybe put those two worlds together to create a farewell ritual around the manifesto.

Wijbrand Schaap

That goes off the wall.

Yves Degryse

It is an idea that Barbara comes up with a farewell ritual for this period and for this manifesto, such that we can start making a new name in the new city.

Wijbrand Schaap

Exciting!

Yves Degryse

We also said: we are not going to come in with a battering ram. A lot of good things have happened. A lot of things have been thrown open. We are also going to build on that. There are going to be some things that we really want to change, that want to change course. But that's not going to be in the first six months. That house doesn't need that either. It's also really important to sense what a house needs. And none of that is a battering ram. That was very different when Milo entered or was appointed. That was a house in complete crisis. There, a figure like Milo was the best choice. Coming in as a battering ram and just going and doing and making hard choices with big consequences.

Yves Degryse

However, a pro has a profile that makes him not only responsible, I mean Stefan Fleske and Steven Genen deserve at least equal credit for it. That trio has really been able to put NTGent back on the map, or give it a profile, or at least made an arrow, signposting both to the team and to the outside world. We are not going in that direction. Now those arrows are going to be moved a little softer anyway.