sarma

In this section we plunge into an artist’s ‘reservoir’: the library, video and record collections, the archives and the experiences on which they draw when engaged in creative work. This season, on the occasion of Kaaitheater’s 30th anniversary, we are hearing from artists who have a long career behind them and whose work we have often shown. In 1993 Guy Cassiers created Het liegen in ontbinding in the Kaaitheater Studios. In December 2007 he will be presenting Wolfskers, a production by Toneelhuis, whose artistic director he is, in the main Kaaitheater theatre.

As important as art and music are to me, language is nevertheless the most dear to me: it is what makes a human human. I ended up in theatre because I am not so good at expressing what is on my mind. In the theatre I can use someone else’s words, draw strength from language and, on the basis of other disciplines, try to understand this language as well as possible, and to examine with the other people around me. I discover what I think of the world through the eyes of others: I still feel a certain embarrassment about saying in words how I myself think the world works. Learning to speak, trying to find a language of my own. That is why Peter Handke’s Kaspar is so dear to me. I have also acted that play myself. At the start of my career I was very much involved with German literature. I was able to identify with those spoken word pieces of Handke’s and with Bildungsromans such as Rilke’s Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge. And with Thomas Mann, whose novella Tristan I staged. I was attracted by that period, the fin de siècle, just before the First World War. In Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu I returned to that period, but by a roundabout route and this time in French literature. That period seems to me to have been a pivotal moment in western culture: disaster was imminent. These writers realised that everything was coming to an end, everything had to be rethought. They glorified the past, but at the same time knew that complete renewal was necessary.

Sometimes quotations from such philosophers as Wittgenstein and Sloterdijk give me a starting point. Scientists have always had a great impact on my work, especially those who try to expand science and with their incredible creativity seek out what does not yet exist, how man is made up. Like the Russian neurologist Alexander Lurija and Oliver Sacks, and the way, with so much creativity and respect, they unconstrainedly try to re-create an individual’s potential. The Art of Memory by the British historian Frances Yates, gave me an understanding of the history of memory, the evolution of our brain, and the relationships between language and writing, and art and science. Before the printed book, man was obliged to train his brain to gather and keep information. Art played an essential part. In the Greek period, people studied by walking round in the town and in that way memorising numerous stories. What a marvellous image! People walking round the town in the silence of the night memorising stories by making use of the architecture and the buildings. Nowadays we no longer train that sort of ability to memorise because we no longer need to store all that knowledge. It’s all in our computers now.

The work of the Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky means a great deal to me, both his films and the book Sculpting in Time, a philosophical essay on his way of creating and about the importance of art and the artist to society. I was less interested by the religious aspect, but I find his thoughts on art and time – in all its guises – of inestimable value. As a student, his film Stalker threw me into confusion, both its content and its form. It is about a scientist, a writer and their guide, who find themselves in an indeterminable region. All three are trying to improve the world, but in the end decide that they are incapable of doing so. By means of the film’s tremendous expressive power, Tarkovsky actually creates from this fatalistic conclusion the opposite answer, among other things by means of the closing shot: a child with no arms or legs makes a glass on the table vibrate and fall to the floor simply by looking at it. He plays a great deal with time in that film. He distorts time so much that the notion of time ceases to exist. You find that in Proust too. It’s about generating a view of the future from the past you carry within you. Both Proust and Tarkovsky try to accentuate the potential of the senses to the maximum, not only for themselves but also for the readers/viewers. Proust’s keen eye for detail helps me to look and listen better and at the same time makes us realise that there is no reality, that everything is founded on imagination, and that we make choices every second about what we record through our senses and thereby entirely direct our image of reality. Bergman is another great master of film whose work has meant a lot to me since my student days. He has ‘mastered language’. In many of his films there is not very much speech – Persona, for example, is about being silent. In later periods he made films in which we only see talking heads and hardly any images. He has passed through so many stages: it is an incredibly rich oeuvre.

As far as Beckett is concerned, I mainly want to read it rather than stage it. I incorporated one of his pieces, Cascando, into Het liegen in ontbinding because it was right for the overall framework of the play. He seeks out the essential, the distillation, in such a way that I find anything you add to it is always a disappointment. The shape of theatre writing, the way we are able to tell a story on stage, has evolved enormously over the last twenty or thirty years. We have left behind us the idea that all we should put on stage is dialogues, and also the trauma that we might be film’s poor relation. In my view, the word ‘repertoire’ covers much more than playwriting. In theory everything is possible and permissible.

Film, radio and TV have a huge impact on my work. I also used to read a lot of strip cartoons. After that, and after the fairytales, as a child I started reading Agatha Christie. Thrillers give me a sort of security. Each book has the same pattern, the world is as it should be: you have a problem and it is solved. Nowadays I solve Sudoku puzzles to relax. Fitting all those figures perfectly into a grid: that too is a world that is as it should be. It’s a pleasure because in my work I am always involved with things that are not as they should be.

I have always been fascinated by Japanese culture. I have never been there but I have read a considerable amount of Japanese literature. There is that mutually problematic relationship between Japan and the West, a constant attraction and repulsion. I have focused on it through the work of Marguerite Duras (Hiroshima mon amour), Tanizaki and Kawabata, and through Hirohito in Wolfskers. What attracts me about their culture is the contrast between their way of expressing themselves, both cautiously and very explicitly. They often go much further than we would dare say or show. I don’t understand it at all, and that’s why it fascinates me.

There are two musical figures I always return to. One is Bach: both his studies and his voluminous works, because the music is so lucid. It covers the entire range. The other is Miles Davis. He experienced every step in the history of jazz. He integrated every influence he met and yet very forcefully gave his own colour to it all. It’s a beautiful thing to follow the course of someone like that, who absorbs everything. Bach is the opposite of that, with a consistency that endures from beginning to end.

There is one building that has made a profound impression on me in recent years. I saw Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin when it was still empty: it was an indescribable experience. The empty building, the stones, the lines, and knowing how Libeskind had arrived at them: to me all this tells the whole story of the Jewish people in a much more emotional way than any other material possibly could. The place I always return to is New York. It has all the advantages and disadvantages of ‘the city’ in their most extreme form. It is such a mixture of cultures, but no one appropriates it, being happy to make a contribution to the greater whole. I see it as an open city that expands ones horizons. Every visit is a voyage of discovery, in the same way as some books can be read again and again, such as Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which immediately makes clear how relative travel actually is, since a single city can be seen completely differently on different occasions by everyone who lives in it.