Locations of Dramaturgy – Kris Verdonck

Abstract

Drawing on training in visual arts and theatre studies, Kris Verdonck creates arts works using spatially transforming elements such as light, haze, water and projections. His works combine elements of installation and performance art and utilize high definition video and machinic objects. In this essay I will consider how Verdonck explores ideas of theatre as a way of framing a sensible encounter that combines physical properties and metaphorical aspects. Verdonck creates situations where acts of watching and experiencing his performances are embodied and self-reflexive; where a memory of theatre (in contrast to Camillio's ‘theatre of memory’) as a primary experience is always evoked. At the same time, his ‘theatre’ often questions the very idea of liveness and is presented in various stages of redundancy and reinvention: to act is useless, but to act is to go on, to paraphrase Samuel Beckett, whose texts are sometimes adapted in Verdonck's performances. Cohering his work is the notion of ‘figures’: forms and objects manipulated in the artistic process and ‘acting’ (‘figuur’ from the Dutch can be translated to mean a character or personage) while also having a conceptual focus on the changing purview of figures in the context of expressive media. I argue that this encounter is productively seen as dramaturgical in the sense that Verdonck uses and subverts the vocabulary of performance making in expressive ways. Thus, I focus on the question of dramaturgy in Verdonck's work and think about the ways that his dramaturgy refashions ideas of theatre. In an exploration of two contrasting arts works made by Verdonck in 2011 aided by an extended consideration of the idea of the figure, I aim show how Verdonck's work is proposing an experimental dramaturgy and a memory of theatre as a transforming medium.

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