ESSAY: “Past and Present, Here and Now”

Who can make us believe that everything has simply passed, that what we have experienced lies behind us? Who can convince us that the past does not live on, here and now? That it does not continue to exist in a different form or a different place? No matter how much they bombard us with reality, we don't believe them. There is no past. We just call it the past. In reality, the past lives here, now. And who can make us believe it’s pointless to let the past splash our face every morning like water?

After Barış Bıçakçı’s Our Grand Despair  (Bizim Büyük Çaresizliğimiz)

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I’m at NTGent’s ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL. There are five minutes to go before the start of Radio Insomnia. On my right, all but two of the audience seats are already full. On my left is the mobile coffee bar run by Komaf, where the audience can get free tea or coffee. I have to decide quickly, and I opt for coffee because I’m not entirely awake yet. “Latte, please”, I say to the barista. My voice gets quieter after the word latte. I’m still afraid that I’m pronouncing the Dutch word for ‘please’ wrongly. ‘Alsjeblieft’... try it, you’ll see what I mean. The barista picks up on the hesitancy in my voice and says: “I’m learning Dutch too.” As he prepares my latte, he tells me he’s volunteering with Komaf to learn Dutch. It’s eleven o’clock now, but Radio Insomnia  by DE HOE hasn’t started yet. There’s one empty seat left. Just then, a man on a bicycle comes up to us. The friendly barista greets him warmly in English, saying with a smile: "You are on time.” The cyclist looks first at him, then at me, and asks: “Do you mean in  time? Because I am on place but not on  time, right?” I consider the difference between on time and in  time. The cyclist asks the barista: “What is your English level?” His question irritates me, so I interrupt: “You understand what he means, why do you ask for his level?” The cyclist turns to me and says, “My name is Michael.” He takes the last empty seat. My inner voice answers him: “Ah, okay then. My name is Rojda, it was a pleasure to meet you.”

In Greek tragedies, a hero who is superior and fortunate in every way makes a fatal error in spite of all his privileges. The life of Oedipus, the best-known character in the surviving tragedies, is an example of this. His tragedy begins when, unable to tolerate the rumours that he is a foster child, he visits an oracle. The fortune teller tells him that he will murder his father and marry his mother. To escape this terrible future, Oedipus leaves the city where he lives and embarks on a long journey to build a new life for himself in another city. On the way, he meets an old traveller in a narrow pass. He asks the man to step aside, but his request is ignored. The young hero falls prey to his arrogance and rage. He murders the stubborn old man on the spot, because he believes it is his right to do so. However, the old man turns out to be his biological father, whom he has never met. Oedipus’ inability to keep his cool leads him to make a tragic mistake.

The source of this tragic mistake is called hubris. Hubris means arrogance, insolence, excess or transgression. This is what leads the hero into disaster. Hubris, a vice that is intrinsic to humanity, is present in all of us, even thousands of years later. It still leads us to make mistakes today. But we don’t make mistakes like Oedipus does. Sometimes we just ask, “What is your English level?” This might seem like a minor faux pas in comparison to the mistakes committed in tragedies, but every mistake, big or small, leads to a tragic outcome. This kind of discourse legitimises a marginalising attitude and the spread of such an attitude throughout society. This spread is not innocent, like sound spreading around a space. Discourse affects people. Some are wounded by it; some normalise and perpetuate it. The result is tragic, although this tragic ending is entirely different to the way tragic heroes meet their end. What we really need is a mirror to protect ourselves from tragic endings. This mirror needs to show us our mistakes, so that we can try to avoid them. This mirror can be nothing other than the theatre.

WHAT IS TRAGIC TODAY?

Not all of the 32 surviving Greek tragedies are equally well known. The story of Oedipus is very popular, but Rhesus, a tragedy supposedly written by Euripides, is less famous. To be honest, I wasn’t very familiar with Rhesus  either. I only knew that there are researchers who claim that this play was not written by Euripides, given its structure and vocabulary. In spite of this uncertainty, Rhesus  tends to be attributed to Euripides nowadays. I find this tragedy on the Euripides shelf of my university library. I read the text hastily to prepare myself for Radio Insomnia, the adaptation of Rhesus  by DE HOE.

The audience gather at the Watersportbaan, a popular place for canoeing, kayaking and running. There is a 90-metre pontoon floating on the 2.3-kilometre-long canal, with a table standing on the pontoon. The canal looks like a city square, with the centre of Ghent on the right and the Blaarmeersen recreation park on the left. As the music starts, actors in white costumes holding red flags appear along the left-hand side of the pontoon. At that moment, I remember the introduction to this text:

Late night on the plain of Troy.  
To the left are the advance lines of the Trojans and their allies.  
To the right is the city and the road to the mountains.  
A chorus of fifteen Trojan soldiers enters from the left.

The radio broadcast begins with an announcement by DE HOE actor Willem de Wolf: “If you’ve just joined us, you’re listening to Radio Insomnia, nighttime radio for the sleepless and people of the night.” Thus the connection is made between this night radio programme and Rhesus, the only tragedy set in the nighttime. But it is eleven o’clock in the morning, even if it is grey and overcast. So De Wolf asks us to pretend that it’s nighttime, adding to his request: “The intention is to think aloud for just under an hour, to think aloud together associatively about the tragedy and the tragic in general.” In the discussion that unfurls during the radio programme, anecdotal information is presented, such as the fact that Rhesus is the king of Thrace, that he dies on the first day of the Trojan War, and that the text is pseudo-Euripidean. But it’s not about Rhesus himself. The actor Peter Van den Eede remarks: “So the people who’ve come to Rhesus are going to think: What kind of strange play is this?” Radio Insomnia  is about our contemporary tragedy. But to see the tragedy of today, we need to create distance. “You don’t say: ‘I’m tragic.’ You need distance for that”, explains Ans Van den Eede.

Classical tragedies invite their audience to view the tension between different claims to the truth from a distance. Although many tragedies were written for Athenians, the stories are not always set in Athens. They take place far from Athens, in the city of Thebes. This distance is made tangible in Radio Insomnia. The abstract distance corresponds to the spatial distance between the actors in DE HOE and the audience. The actors are such a long way from the audience, out on the water, that it is a challenge for the audience to see them. Which is why we listen to them. Listening to the radio becomes a collective experience; profound subjects are discussed. At a certain point, the actor Carine Van Bruggen says that we “sometimes cause exactly what we hope to avoid”. This recalls the continuation of Oedipus’ story, as I told it above.

After killing the old man he meets on the road, Oedipus arrives in Thebes, where he encounters the Sphinx. He gains victory over the Sphinx by solving her riddle. That gives him the right to enter the city, and he saves Thebes from the Sphinx’s tyranny. He is crowned king and takes the widowed queen of the city as his wife. In the rest of the story, disasters afflict both Oedipus and Thebes. Oediups returns to the oracle and discovers that he has murdered his biological father and married his mother. In other words: he caused exactly what he hoped to avoid.

As DE HOE see it, we cause the disasters we hope to avoid. The tragedy of being trapped inside the catastrophe you were trying to flee has not changed over thousands of years. The only thing that has changed seems to be our reaction to such catastrophes. When a disaster overcame the ancient Greeks, they accepted it. Things are different today. When a disaster afflicts us, we are enraged. We run away from climate crises, although we were the ones who made the big and small mistakes that caused these crises in the first place. Our individual mistakes mount up, and sooner or later the catastrophe will come to us. But that is difficult to accept. Take the weather forecast for 18 June, the day of Radio Insomnia : the forecast said it would rain. But it didn’t. That makes us angry with the meteorologists because their forecasts are inaccurate. The weather has become unpredictable, and that isn’t the meteorologists’ fault. As Carine Van Bruggen says: “We live in a country where people threaten the weathermen because it rains.”

HOW DO THE TRAGEDIES AFFECT OUR BODIES?

Just like us, Oedipus is responsible for the catastrophe he experiences. When he finds out the truth from the oracle, he cannot bear it and stabs out his eyes for not showing him the truth. But that is not enough. He leaves the city with his two daughters. The hero who assumes his responsibility for disrupting the proper order of things is caught up in a process of heroic suffering. Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus  relates what happens next, which is to say: what happens to Oedipus after he leaves Thebes. With his soul and body in pain, Oedipus searches for peace. His quest takes him to Colonus, the place that has given its name to Lisbeth Gruwez’ dance production.

The road to Colonus appears to be in the Blaarmeersen, identified as the Vissersdijk. This is a path along a canal with a bridge at the end of the path. The steps lead to the water, and the spot looks a bit like a Greek temple, an idyll in nature. Lisbeth Gruwez, a dancer and choreographer with the company Voetvolk, meets her audience here at 7 o’clock in the morning for Kolonos. Her dance production is about Oedipus going to Colonus, a district of Athens. Oedipus asks Theseus, the king of Athens, for protection. The king, who attaches great importance to the hospitality of the Athenian people, allows him in. The absolute peace that Oedipus is seeking is only possible in death. In Colonus, he waits for serenity, which is to say he waits for his death.

At the end of the play, death is waiting. Oedipus tells Theseus of his impending death and of the place where he will die, but no one is allowed to know where he will be buried. And that is how Oedipus disappears. Gruwez’ body tells the story of the disappearance of a body that cannot withstand mental pain. The body shrinks in space and disappears. The performance is wordless; Gruwez’ body is sufficient. As we see her physically fading away, runners form a backdrop on the path behind her. Their speed contrasts with Gruwez’ slowness. People who come here jogging in the early hours of the morning feel strongly connected with this world, despite all the suffering. Whereas Oedipus, shrinking into himself at the water’s edge, is a body that wants to disappear from the world.

Kolonos  is about Oedipus’ transition from ignorance to wisdom. This wisdom is made possible through the confrontation with himself and memory. Gruwez studies herself slowly in the water. In Slowness, Milan Kundera claims: “There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.” When we want to forget an event, we speed up our pace. We leave the place quickly. But if we want to remember, we slow down. The scene with Gruwez at the waterside and the runners in the background seems to confront the activities of remembering and forgetting with the dichotomy of speed and slowness. Oedipus’ suffering body and his memories slow him down. So he gazes slowly at his reflection. He seems to recognise it, but the passers-by in the background run away from him quickly. This constitutes our tragedy within the capitalist system. We are forced to live at lightning speed, but our bodies need to slow down to remember and process our suffering.

I WOULD NOT CALL MY LIFE TRAGIC, BUT PEOPLE AROUND ME DO

The third performance in the eighth week is a theatrical reading of Elektra Unbound, a production by NTGent. The audience gather for this reading in front of the ski chalet in Blaarmeersen recreation park. The script is about the auditions held by the director, ‘Lua’ (Luanda Casella) and her assistant Lucius Romeo-Fromm. There are three actors who come to do an audition in this talent hunt: Abigail Gypens, Bavo Buys and Emma Van Ammel. ‘Lua’ is under pressure to make a different, more feminist version of Electra. But in her view, Electra is not a feminist, just “a dirty little thing in love with her father”. In Sophocles’ text, Electra’s mother has murdered her father, and Electra wants to avenge him. Yet she doesn’t take action; she merely tries to make everyone share in her pain. Correspondingly, in this talent hunt, ‘Lua’ isn’t looking for talented actors. She wants to find a pain that echoes Electra’s pain. The actors who come to the audition are obliged to sell their own suffering to get the part.

Luanda Casella makes her audience think about suffering. What does it mean today to be in pain? Or can we feel someone else’s pain as if it were our own?

In his Poetics, Aristotle discusses the function of tragedy. The aim is to make the audience fear that they might end up in the same situation as the hero, whilst also evoking sympathy. Sympathy is a form of empathy; someone feels another’s suffering. The art historian Delfani Baluch is conducting neurological research into empathy and catharsis, arising from an emotional connection of this kind. In her analysis, what happens on stage activates the mirror neurones in the brain, resulting in empathy. In a certain sense, the nerves react as though the pain were happening to us personally. For example, if we see someone’s hand being cut off, our mirror neurones are activated, and we think it’s our own hand. However, the understanding that the receptors in the skin are not really conveying a message to the brain that damage has been done generates awareness. We realise that we have not suffered this ourselves. And so the audience watching a tragedy realise after a while that these disasters have not happened to them. A sense of relief follows, with the audience reconsidering their own character traits. And so a purification or ‘catharsis’ occurs.

However, the social reaction to fictional suffering on stage in Aristotle’s time is different to the way we react now. The neural reaction to pain in the human brain has not changed, but audiences then did not see fictional pain every day, which is how the catharsis they experienced could be an ethical purification. A purification that shaped their character. Today we do not only observe fictional pain, but also a constant stream of real pain. This leads to the normalisation of pain, which can simply be ‘consumed’.

In The Cultural Politics of Emotions, Sara Ahmed writes that people today constantly expect others to understand their suffering. That is why we attempt to explain our pain. As such, we have the tendency to socialise our pain. However, Ahmed believes that it is not possible to understand suffering truly and fully. The only thing we can do is feel a desire to understand the other’s pain. This desire varies depending on whose suffering it is. If the other person has no personal or social value to us, we have no desire to understand their suffering.

It is possible to explore Ahmed’s discourse by watching the way the main characters in Elektra Unbound  deal with pain and the fact that pain is always present today. After all, our desire to understand suffering is also dependent on the frequency with which we encounter another’s suffering. At present, our suffering pervades the space in which we find ourselves. It has become our atmosphere. We are so surrounded by it that we breathe it in. Fortunately, suffering is not as essential as oxygen. We can live without it. While genocides are happening elsewhere in the world, some people can go on living, without even feeling the desire to understand this suffering.

I AM A WALNUT TREE IN GÜLHANE PARK

The lines “I am a walnut tree in Gülhane Park. You cannot distinguish me from it, and neither can the police”, are by Nazım Hikmet. The story goes that Hikmet, who was wanted by the police in the 1970s because of his political convictions, went to Gülhane Park to see his beloved. The police stormed the park. When he saw the police, Hikmet climbed into a walnut tree to escape. In the meantime, his beloved arrived, but he couldn’t get to her. The only way to be with her in the park appeared to be by turning into a walnut tree.

The poem reminds me of Euripides’ Bacchae, in the sense that the play offers a platform for debates about control over land and the ideal citizen as defined by governments. Hikmet was not allowed to enter Gülhane Park because he was not considered to be an ideal citizen, just as Dionysus was not allowed to enter the city of Thebes because he was not seen as an ideal god.

The Bacchae, Euripides’ last tragedy and the last in this series of Greek tragedies, is a coproduction between Villa Voortman and Het Scheldeoffensief. This tragedy occupies an important place among tragedies, since it is about Dionysus, the god of the theatre. In this story, the god – also known as Bacchus – is not acknowledged by Pentheus, the king of Thebes. So Dionysus comes to the city in human form to try and prove his divine status. Although the people accept him, Pentheus refuses to allow that he is a god. Dionysus enchants the women of Thebes, including Agave, Pentheus’ mother, and takes them to Mount Cithaeron. The women in his entourage are called maenads or bacchantes; they form the chorus within the tragedy. They become intoxicated on the mountain and conduct ecstatic rites. Pentheus has created an ideal identity for his people within a male order, and women who get drunk in this way do not belong in it.

When we talk about resistance to the concept of the ‘ideal citizen’, two important organisations in Ghent have a role to play. Villa Voortman emerged as a response to the existing psychiatric system; Het Scheldeoffensief is a specialised theatre lab committed to inclusive theatre. Both make a stand for inclusivity and diversity. The writer Sara Ahmed criticises certain institutions and their superficial claims to diversity with her famous statement: “Diversity is like a big shiny red apple, right, and it all looks wonderful, but there’s a rotten core in there and it’s not actually being addressed.” Villa Voortman and Het Scheldeoffensief absolutely do not belong to this category of institution.

In this version of The Bacchae, the hilly area opposite the public beach in the Blaarmeersen becomes Mount Cithaeron. Many people gather at the foot of this slope. The festival has been plagued with rainy weather for eight weeks, but today the sun is shining. It’s hot, and the cheerful voices of people sunning themselves on the ‘public beach’ reach the theatre audience on the other side of the lake. I call it ‘public’ in quotation marks, because the Covid measures taken in the past have restricted the public nature of this beach.

In Ghent, like everywhere else in the world, the pandemic led to various restrictions. One such measure was the introduction of an identity check system around Blaarmeersen to maintain social distancing in public places. This was ostensibly for health reasons, but the real reason was to put an end to the fights that were breaking out at Blaarmeersen in that period. Access was limited for visitors from outside East Flanders. The journalist Lode Cossaer emphasised in Knack  that “exceptional times require exceptional measures”, but that this rule is often used by governments to increase their power in times of crisis. The measures in Blaarmeersen illustrate this. Young people of colour were specifically subjected to identity checks. The access of the ‘other’ to a space was restricted on the premise of ‘health and safety measures’.

The story being told today on the hill opposite that beach is also a story about otherness. Watching this tragedy, which concentrates mainly on women, and comparing this work to Euripides’ other tragedies might give the impression that Euripides was a champion of women’s rights. However, his attention is focused on a broader question of the Other. By setting women’s resistance against oppressive, male rules, Euripides reveals the distorted balance of power in the prevailing order of the time. It was a patriarchal order in which women suffered, but so did everyone who was ‘other’.

Today, the ideal citizen is an ‘average person’, a profile that is fed by statistics. Anyone who does not fit this statistical picture is the Other and will always remain outside this category. Villa Voortman is a place committed to reintegrating citizens with a double psychiatric diagnosis into society, by means that include art. Het Scheldeoffensief aims to detect enthusiasm and talent for theatre among adults and young people with and without disabilities, challenge this talent and reveal it to a wide audience. Both organisations resist the order that develops a control mechanism to banish ‘others’ from public life, like the women in The Bacchae. 

Where public life, a zone of plurality, is concerned, we enter an area full of conflicts, contradictions and differences. Involving everyone introduces complexities. The government’s control mechanisms reconfigure public  spaces, which in essence should be collective, into mere shared  spaces. We walk in the same streets, go to the same shops, live in the same buildings. But none of these spaces is diverse or inclusive: they are merely ‘shared’. There are constant controls on the people with whom we share these spaces. And those who can be included in shared spaces are ideal citizens. Everyone who does not fit this description is excluded.

During the pandemic, Blaarmeersen was not a public space, but a shared one. Although that period has passed, the spirit of that episode still hangs in the air. On the opposite shore of the lake are the artists of Villa Voortman and Het Scheldeoffensief, who represent those who do not have access. Like the bacchantes, they conduct their own dances and rituals, and they resist these mechanisms.

According to Nietzsche, Euripides’ tragedies were the ones that robbed tragedy of its Dionysian essence. Euripides distanced himself from the attempt to create an ideal citizen in his texts. That is why those who do not meet the definition of the ideal citizen in this tragedy can be represented by these two organisations. They ensure that society accepts them as they are. For the finale of the ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL, no other partners than Villa Voortman and Het Scheldeoffensief were imaginable.

WE NEED AN ENDING IN ORDER TO BE REBORN

During the ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL, the past inspired today’s artists, and the festival got the audience thinking collectively about the problems of public space in our time. It gave us a free theatre performance every morning, letting it splash our faces like water.

After The Bacchae, the actors, audience and producers all went down to the shore of Blaarmeersen lake to bring the festival to a close. On 1 May 2024, Prometheus’ fire was lit in front of Ghent’s iconic library building. On 23 June it was plunged, sizzling, into the waters of Blaarmeersen lake. This fire has been completely extinguished. It no longer exists. That means the festival is over. But is this a definitive ending? I don’t think so. We mustn’t forget that Dionysus, the god of the theatre, has yet another aspect. He is also the god of rebirth. The alternation of the seasons, the death and rebirth of nature mark his presence. Theatre is Dionysus and he will be reborn. The extinguishing of the festival fire cannot be a definitive ending. It merely marks the ending we need in order to be reborn.

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With thanks to Agnes de Maeseneir and Matthias Velle for their trust, and to Evelyne Coussens for her feedback on this essay. I would also like to thank Ans Van den Eede, Dirk Bryssinck, Dirk Pauwels, Frank Dierens, Lisa Gunstone, Lisbeth Gruwez, Maarten van Cauwenberghe and Wannes Gyselinck for their interviews during the festival. Finally, I would like to thank Ilias De Mulder and my friend Tarık Alperen Safak, who tried to change the system they were in and fought to do so.