P R O J E C T
'Les Aveugles (The blind people 1890)' has sometimes been considered as one of the worst drama's the Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck ever has written. Indeed, it is very hard to call it a drama at all : the characters lack any psychology and there is no evolution whatsoever. Everything happens out of sight, out of the frame in this drama. But in that sense, it is probably the most typically mystical drama of Maurice Maeterlinck. Behind every sentence, every movement, every sound there is hidden world of mystical meanings, probably clear to Maurice Maeterlinck himself only.
When reading the text now, a very disturbing world opens. By making the symbolic meaning of this play very dense and complex, this meaning falls apart into absurdity. One can only guess the despair, provoked by this lacking of any clear meaning. And that precisely is the main theme of this drama : when God dies, there is no common ground no more, only individual isolation and absurdity and death. In that sense, this drama must have been – and most probably was – the inspiration for 'Waiting for Godot' by Samuel Becket.

In this video, I tried to evoke the aesthetics of the absence of meaning. How one tries to overpower the silence, just by talking on and on. By making up stories and meanings in one's mind. By being just beautiful, by expecting something or perhaps nothing.
For this, I worked with eight young actors during a month, in Ruesta, somewhere in Spain. We worked very hard on 'the blank look', 'the expecting without expecting' and 'being emotional in absence of emotions'. Every dialogue was treated as being a monologue. No one talks to no one. No one looks to no one. This resulted in atmosphere of extreme, artificial loneliness and in an aesthetic environment of isolation, which almost hurts and eventually dies down.

But deep down, someone is longing for something. Il y a encore autre chose; there is something else somewhere.

C R E D I T S
text
Maurice Maeterlinck
with
Hilde Hautekees, Koenraad Heiremans, Erik Kerckx, Roel Moons, Peggy Op De Beeck, Griet Sterckx, Ellen Van De Staey, Hein Wollants
voices
Bernard Eylenbosch, Isabelle Brouillard, Stephanie Coerten, Juan Marquez, Xavier Alvarez, Bertrand Kahn, Bernard Boudru
assistants
Anne Quirynen and Peter De Bie
sound and music
Hans Helewaut
executive producer
Josee Lehon
production
Stichting Kunst in het College vzw
AV–Dienst KU.Leuven

thanks to the people of Urries and Ruesta, Zaragossa.
Johan Van Heddegem, Beurschouwburg Brussel,
Sint–Jozefscollege Aarschot, the parents of the kids
supported by de Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie
van het Brussels Hoofdstedelijk Gewest
and the Ministerie van de Vlaamse Gemeenschap
Administratie Kunst
Ampex Belgium

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