The Associated Artists of the Conference // FC Bergman

2020 EASTAP ASSOCIATE ARTISTS

27 February // 12.00-13.00
Arena del Sole Theatre (Sala de Berardinis) – Bologna
Plenary session

FC Bergman – Theatre Company, Belgium
The Form as Content
Chair: Claudio Longhi

FC Bergman’s work is characterized by an epic, hyper-realistic design that puts the framework of a theatre performance and the idea of a scenography under pressure and makes it explode. The form of their performances can best be described as an autonomous installation that not only submits the characters to its material laws, but also catches the spectators’ eye and seduces them beyond the realistic horizon into a mythical gaze: the houses and the woods in 300 el x 50 el x 30 el, the swimming pool and the car in Van den Vos, the museum hall and the Rubens painting in Het land Nod or the apartment building in JR. The characters are absorbed into a hyper-real universe that encloses and destroys them. The size and extent of the scenography, the quantity and authenticity of the details, force the spectators into a perspective in which the meaning can always disappear behind the matter. The search for meaning is knitted together with a physical experience.

Biography
FC Bergman was founded in 2008 by six actors / theatre-makers / artists: Stef Aerts, Joé Agemans, Bart Hollanders, Matteo Simoni, Thomas Verstraeten and Marie Vinck. FC Bergman has been a permanent Toneelhuis theatre-maker since 2013. In a short time, this group of makers has developed a highly unique theatrical idiom, which apart from being anarchistic and slightly chaotic, is essentially visual and poetic. Their productions often give centre stage to the floundering, ever-striving human. The most recent and impressive production in that series, JR, literally and figuratively takes this theme to the next level. Simoni and Hollanders have since left the core team and now work on an adhoc basis with FC Bergman. In 2009 FC Bergman won the Young Theatre Prize at Theater Aan Zee with its adaptation of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming. With Walking along the Champs-Elysées with a tortoise so as to have a better look at the world, but it is difficult to drink tea on an ice floe if everyone is drunk FC Bergman was short-listed for the Dutch Theatre Festival (2010). In 2011 FC Bergman created 300 el x 50 el x 30 el at Toneelhuis, a production still on the repertoire. Terminator Trilogy, created in 2012, was again a site specific work that toured internationally. Back in Toneelhuis (where FC Bergman is a collective in residence) they created an impressive music theatre project, Van den vos (December 2013), together with Liesa van der Aa, Muziektheater Transparent and Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop (DE). In 2015 FC Bergman made a site-specific show Het land Nod (The Land Of Nod): «In this atmospheric, scriptless production FC Bergman measures up to the greats: the mystical naturalism of Romeo Castellucci, the disconsolate absurdism of Christoph Marthaler, and the dancing dynamics of Pina Bausch. And all that gives Het land Nod visual grandeur» said Wouter Hillaert in De Standaard ***, May 9th 2015. The show was invited to participate in 2016 in the Festival of Avignon (FR) and the Zürcher Theater Spektakel (CH). Het Land Nod remains on the repertoire (and after Spain, France and Poland, is now also going to Russia and Italy). In March 2018, FC Bergman completed JR. This site-specific project based on the eponymous cult novel by William Gaddis has since been acclaimed as the major theatre event of 2018. Through an ingenious interweaving of film and theatre, powerful acting with strong dialogues and astounding scenography, FC Bergman has taken his work to another level. At the same time, the company has remained true to itself, in the course of the show painting a picture of a world in which man fights against the windmills of his existence in vain. The show has meanwhile met with success in Paris and in the 2019-2020 season it can be admired in Brussels. Plans for Hong Kong and New York are also taking shape… In the 2019-2020 season, FC Bergman is collaborating on Freud, a production by ITA: FC Bergan is making an adaptation of Sartre’s original script. What’s more, Stef Aerts, Marie Vinck, Matteo Simoni are playing the roles of a number of characters in Freud, including the lead role, performed by Stef Aerts. The members of FC Bergman are individually involved in various other theatre productions, TV projects and films or make productions, installations and videos under their own name