Reviews

Hovering between life and death

There are several reasons why BDE is worth watching. On stage: François Beukelaers, one of our older actors still standing, and the guys from Stray Dogs, who make music that hovers somewhere between jazz, rock and electronica. The lyrics are by Jeroen Brouwers, not the least when it comes to eloquent whining with substance. It is directed by Judith Vindevogel, a long-time fixture in musical theatre land.
NDE, 'near-death experience', tells the story of an elderly man on his way to his native region. While dreaming away at the thought of his very first love, he has an accident. He floats between life and death. Facing the end, the man sputters fragilely, the fierce music blares with vitality. And then there are two screens shaping what cannot be captured in words and melodies. It is a whirlwind, all together like this. And even though sometimes a person is in danger of not seeing the wood for the trees, there are enough beautiful moments to keep you on your toes.

Griet Op de Beeck in DMM 07/01/12

The film of a failed life

(...) Without much ado, another Brouwer text was recently published by publishing house and antiquarian bookshop Demian, written for theatre company Walpurgis, which used it to create a multimedia musical performance. But even without that stage context, BDE (near-death experience) is independently savourable, all the more so because it again fits seamlessly into that ever-expanding, large, resonant sound box of Brouwer's oeuvre. Moreover, Jelle Jespers' pared-down design makes the 'novella' a desirable book object. (...)

(...) NDE is an alienating, sometimes cold to the heart text, vintage Brewers, but at the same time a subtle rêverie about the twilight zone of dying, captured in a slightly more austere language than we are used to from him.

Dirk Leyman in De Morgen on 05/01/12

Theatre: BDE, Walpurgis

'That I have been untold lucky,' whispers François Beukelaers' velvety bass voice at the start of NDE (near-death experience). The tenor of the words and the timbre of the voice foreshadow an intimate performance about an elderly man's (last) car journey that will end fatally. The austere, dark scene with a floor where poppies stick out like darts confirms this suspicion. But! The virtuoso violence of the Stray Dogs (aka Frederik Meulyzer on guitar, cello & laptop and Koenraad Ecker on drums, electronics & laptop) drumming shatters that suspicion with flair. After a few minutes, the musical duo breaks through Beukelaers' subdued narrative with well-aimed drum beats and clever guitar howls. Meulyzer and Ecker elicit a wow from the audience several times by their stunning composition with which they spice up this NDE (Near Death Experience).

Yet that 'wow' does not apply to the entire creation. For that, the rhythms rub against each other too much instead of really complementing each other. There is something lacking in the input of Karen Dick & Diederick Nuyttens, the two visual artists. They mix the images live during the performance. Their abstract, coarse-grained flow of images is a little too kaleidoscopic and only occasionally manages to merge into a fascinating tangle with the narrated word and music. Both artists get stuck in illustrating certain phrases and scenes too one-sidedly. The moments when more sober, concrete images and longer shots are chosen and the duo also ventures into surprising lighting effects, image, word and music do blend into an intriguing whole, shimmering with emotion and poetry. Those moments are too rare.

NDE (Near-death experience) is an "almost-powerful experience". The inventive, musical power of Stray Dogs, the literary gold of Jeroen Brouwers, the warm voice and strangely restrained, hushed acting style of François Beukelaers and the lighting effects of the visual artists. These are quality, extremely diverse building blocks that director Judith Vindevogel did not quite manage to stack into a coherent whole. Rather, the extremes create a fault line throughout the performance. A pity.

Els Van Steenberghe in Knack online on 10/01/12

Walpurgis with NDE: a multidisciplinary confrontation of life and near death

Life is terminal, is how Jeroen Brouwers puts it in BDE bijnadoodervaring, a text he wrote for Music Theatre Walpurgis. Death and near death are dominant in a lot of Brouwers' books, and these notions also continue to hold theatre makers spellbound. Recall the remarkable production Bezonken Rood, also a text by Brouwers, which Dirk Roofthooft brought to several languages and countries, and more recently Adem by Kris Cuppens (Braakland/Zhebilding).

The interweaving of music, image and text, however, does not always prove to be optimally successful. As a reading text, NDE near-death experience is a profound contemplation; as a playtext, however, it is a heavy task, slackening the attention. For her direction, Judith Vindevogel can count on the strong presence of François Beukelaers. In his stately posture, measured movement and voice control, he incarnates a man confronted with some remarkable flashes from his life after a car accident. The text allows few variations: Beukelaers is the deadpan stiffened victim temporarily dwelling in the no-man's land of near death through which the mind comes to insight and understanding.

Directly opposite this character and that chilled situation is then the evocation of an aural and pictorial existence. The world is full of sounds and noise and a succession of image and light. Consequently, the musical and visual input provides some shock effects. The electronic force-feeding on drums and laptop by Frederik Meulyzer and the corresponding thrumming on guitar, cello and laptop by Koenraad Ecker (both of Stray Dogs) not only create an atmosphere, but are actual interventions in a constant juxtaposition of an omnipresent vibrant life and the bleakness of a possible lonely death.

In this contrast, the words must of necessity give way to the music. Even the cinematics by Karen Dick and Diederick Nuyttens cannot always stand up to the waves of the sound stream. Occasionally an image does linger, but there is just not enough interplay and counter-play between the various disciplines to fully captivate. On the other hand, it is precisely this disharmony that refers to the sickness of life: the nostalgia for the utopia of a picturesque quiet life that is disturbed by the unpredictability of an increasingly complex existence with possible doom behind every corner.

Wanting to respond to that in a multidisciplinary way amounts to embarking on a quest with all its risks. Clearly a challenge for Walpurgis, with a little too little daring.

Roger Arteel on Theatremaggezien.be on 03/02/12

WALPURGIS brings Jeroen Brouwers' libretto to life

Brussels - In Jeroen Brouwers' BDE (near-death experience), musical theatre company WALPURGIS does not shy away from contrast: between young and old, between misanthropy and tender beauty

Artistic director Judith Vindevogel puts death in dialogue with fiercely struggling life, interpreted by the electrifying sound of Stray Dogs (Frederik Meulyzer and Koenraad Ecker), somewhere between post-rock, jazz and electronica.
Brouwers' text is stripped of personal anecdotalism, only the essence remains: an elderly man, averse to society, is driven back to the beginning by the impending end. He finds himself on a highway to his native region, propelled by homesickness. More than a physical ride, he is making a mental road trip, mercilessly weighing up the course he has taken.
François Beukelaers is subdued and fragile on stage, while the boys of Stray Dogs pump a musical heartbeat between and under his words. And then there are the two screens on which videographer duo Karen Dick and Diederick Nuyttens unleash their vitalistic visual collages. They face the thankless task of telling what music and words have not yet told, but too often get stuck in symbolic illustration: dark shapes are the shadows on the Styx, a sunrise is a birth.
Vindevogel has tried to give the three media each its own narrative power, but the practice of live performance forces a constant search for balance. Nevertheless, the contrast effect does not miss its mark. Brewers reminds us that we are all permanently in a state of near-death, but the musical ferocity of NDE aims at resistance.

Evelyne Coussens in De Morgen on 08/12/11

(THE AVANT-PREMIERE)
NDE (near-death experience)

What's the point of all this climbing if everything inevitably leads to a 1-metre-seventy cutting, deep among the buttercups and poppies?" asks the man in NDE (near-death experience). A dark thought from the pen of Jeroen Brouwers, who wrote the text for musical theatre WALPURGIS.

Why the choice of Jeroen Brouwers?
JUDITH VINDEVOGEL: Well, I knew that Brouwers had actually wanted to be a musician. When I suggested to him that he writes lyrics like a composer writes music, he finally had to agree. He plays with words, sounds and rhythm - that is also evident in BDE. Do you know Schubert's Winterreise in that wonderful performance by German composer Hans Zender? That one inspired Brouwers: the short story is his existential winter journey.

François Beukelaers, your 73-year-old lead actor, is surrounded by very spry antagonists.
VINDEVOGEL: We love the unconventional way musical duo Stray Dogs handle their music - they work their cello with a hammer, for example. Moreover, the two have enormous charisma on stage and the colour of their music complements the colour and rhythm of the lyrics.

And then you invited young film violence too?
VINDEVOGEL: We felt that the music alone was not enough as a counterpart, which is why we brought in the filmmaking couple Karen Dick and Diederick Nuyttens. They also play live to François Beukelaers' words during the performance, as if they were visual musicians. Their images can follow, complement or contradict the text. Together, all these players form a chamber music ensemble: film, song and music thus almost become part of the same score.

Els Van Steenberghe in FOCUS Knack online on 30/11/11

(...) In the summer of 2008, Dutch writer and essayist Jeroen Brouwers (°1940), commissioned by the Flemish theatre company Walpurgis, put a text on paper and gave it the title BDE / Near-death experience. In a way, the title is misleading. And yet in another sense it is not. Let me explain...
Brouwers does talk - with the strong imagination and language skills that are his own - about uncommon psychic phenomena occurring in an extreme situation, but his story is not about a "classic" NDE as described by Pim Van Lommel and Raymond Moody - and even less about an experience that would refer to an afterlife.
When Brouwers at some point does bring up such a "classical" NDE (and en passant describes its characteristics), his opinion on the subject is short and sharp: "smile about it"! And about the prospect of an afterlife, he scornfully remarks : "According to some clairvoyants, the body dies to return to the grass, but the spirit lives on in eternity. What a repulsive thought! An eternal bodiless survival in full consciousness, but without a sense of time - one should not imagine it if one wanted to still be able to sleep peacefully on earth!".
Yet Brewer's text is indeed about a near-death experience - literally, that is. The first-person narrator (an elderly man who turns out to be called Frederik Beaumors) makes a car journey to his birthplace Terduyn. Just as he has left the motorway and has almost reached his destination, he collides with a ghost driver : a horrific crash! "You were lucky" says the policewoman who pulls him out of his car wreck. And indeed : Fred Beaumors survived, but could also have been dead, so almost died.
In yet another sense, by the way, there is a near-death experience that does not require a crash or cardiac arrest. This is the one we all face every day : our life, which, as Heidegger so aptly put it, is a Sein zum Tode. Brewers : "After all, everyone is permanently a little bit dead, a little bit more every day, life is a terminal illness and in the morning one does not know if one will make it through the night, the only certainty life offers is the pit or the fire, the grass or the ashes...".
To Brouwers' text, the people of Antwerp-based music theatre Walpurgis added (live performed) music and (projected) images. "Added" is not the right word : "we did not want to make a soundtrack or pictures to talk, but a composition in which text, music and images dialogue with each other as equal voices".
In my opinion, they succeeded excellently in that. My wife and I saw the Walpurgis performance of BDE on 6 January this year (2012) and that was another true theatrical experience! For a moment it flashed through my mind : this is drama as the Ancient Greeks, its inventors, intended it : a reflection on the decondition humaine, on the essence of human existence - and not in the solitude of the study, but with an audience.
Everything about the performance was strong : the text by Brouwers, the performance by François Beukelaars, decinematics (images) by Karen Dick and Diederick Nuyttens, and certainly the music by Frederik Meulyzer and Koenraad Eckers (who call themselves The Stray Dogs as performers).
That music, yes, what genre was that now? "Frederik and I met at the jazz school of the Lemmens Institute and formed a band with some students," Koenraad Eckers said in an interview. "When the two of us started to develop our own style, we flew outside the jazz circuit because of being too electronic, not enough jazzy. But then again, for the other scenes like dance, we were too experimental and too little dance. We felt like stray dogs, street dogs, nowhere to go". Well, I was impressed, both by the, what I will call the not-so-significant term avant-garde music, and by their performance!
That text, music and image formed such a cool whole (true Gesamtkunst, no tautology) can, I assume, be credited to director Judith Vindevogel, former opera singer and then founder and inspirer of music theatre Walpurgis. In the 2011-2012 season brochure of her company, she says: "I want to be able to discover, experience, be touched and moved. I am not interested in the gold of Columbus or da Gama, but in the inexhaustible wealth of the imagination. I want to hear stories and always learn, learn and learn again". Yes, if one is that way in life one might be a little less near death.

Frans Wollebrants on his blog Sand in your hand on 20/01/12

As long as they ask me, I will keep working

Actor François Beukelaers (73) feels the breath of death in 'NDE'

Hasselt - It is a treat for the ear, François Beukelaers' recognisable warm bass voice. The actor, an old friend in the theatre circuit and TV series such as 'Katarakt', 'De Smaak Van De Keyser' and 'Ella', may solo the performance 'BDE' (Near Death Experience) by music theatre group Walpurgis. The monologue is based on a text written by Jeroen Brouwers, and is supported by video footage and music by post-rock electronica duo Stray Dogs. The C-Mine Culture Centre in Genk is hosting the premiere of 'BDE'.

An elderly man falls victim to a car crash. His near-death experience makes him reflect on his past life. "He feels the fuel oil-smelling breath of death hitting his face," says actor François Beukelaers. "He is in the eighth decade of his life. Through that accident, a certain consciousness comes in, making him take stock of his life. It is a rather bitter conclusion: the man has been mainly annoyed in his life, with the integral humanity and with himself. Optimistic it is not, but penetrating, cutting. He goes far in analysing his life. In fact, he thinks it is one big disaster."

Retired

According to Beukelaers, however, his character is not sad. "That man doesn't just sit and whine, he's not an old nag. He is really trying to understand what life is about. He never found clarification of what he had to do now, so short on the globe. What are we doing here? Why are we behaving so strangely? Why do we engage in things like 'ambition', when in fact we all end up the same? To such questions he tries to find an answer."

Beukelaers himself is 73 - as is his character in the eighth decade of his life. "I don't have an ounce to do with my character," he thinks. "Although his discourse touches me. I think everyone should dig for themselves and try to figure out what they do with what they are offered in life." Most of Beukelaer's peers have been enjoying retirement for several years. "I am actually retired," agrees the actor. "But I get to keep acting. As long as they ask me, I will keep working. And my wife is okay with all that, yes (laughs)."

Whiplash

'BDE' was inspired by a text written by Zutendalen native Jeroen Brouwers. Walpurgis owner Judith Vindevogel had to exercise some patience before she could set up a collaboration with the author. "There were several conversations a few years ago, and we also corresponded a lot," says Vindevogel. "One day I got a letter: 'Dear Judith, I'm writing a text for you.' And I jumped a hole in the air (laughs)."

The theme, a near-death experience, was ultimately chosen by Brewers himself: "During our conversations, that theme did come up," says Vindevogel. "We both once had a serious car accident. We shared the same surprise: the moment the accident happens, you totally let go. You resign yourself to what happens: 'So this is it, I'm going to die'. Maybe it's this resignation that gets you out without too much damage. My car was totaled at the time, but I got out unscathed. I didn't even have whiplash."

An Smets in Belang van Limburg on 23/11/11

Jeroen Brouwers wrote most haunting death scene

The death scene from Jeroen Brouwers' 'Datumloze dagen' has been voted the most haunting death scene in world literature by readers of De Standaard and listeners of Radio 1.
The Radio 1 programme Joos teamed up with De Standaard der Letteren to search for the most haunting death scene in world literature. 'Death is crucial in the novel,' says Karel Verhoeven, the journalist from De Standaard who was selected as an expert together with poet Maarten Inghels. 'It becomes particularly interesting when love is involved.'

Ten scenes were nominated. In third place is Juliet's death from William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Second place is for The Shards of Justice by A.F.Th. Van der Heyden, which describes the death of the foetus in the belly of murdered actress Sharon Tate.

In first place is the death scene from Datumloze dagen by Jeroen Brouwers, in which a father puts his terminally ill son out of his misery. 'It is no coincidence that Jeroen Brouwers is being awarded on 1 November. Death is everywhere in his work,' he echoed.

The award-winning scene:

Shalom, Nathan, I lift his head which is light as a beach ball, and pull a pillow out from under it. After for the second time, caressing his eye, which has once again flipped open as if by the action of a little spring -a box with a blue stone inside, looking at me- I press, press with my full gravity the pillow on his face, for minutes.

Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, Nathan boy, I'm all so sorry, my whole life, everything sorry, for you, for me, twelve, eleven, ten, nine, had picked a different father after all.

Katrijn Van Giel in Het Nieuwsblad 1/11/11

Public

Dear Judith, a hundredfold kudos! Love. - Jeroen Brouwers

Seized by the words. Always surprised by the music. Wonderful performance. - Karen

Always surprising, Jeroen Brouwers' texts! Impressive what you did with them! Congratulations! - Jan

The silence of the crash completed the surprise and beauty. - Werner

Nice balance between lyrics and music. Every sentence is a delight. - Kaat Vrancken

I still have before me the image of that jetty with two restless little boys and a hushed adult. In it, life is slowed down to an enforced wait, while in the text it seems to end so abruptly and at full speed. Life at any moment as a near death experience. - René Molhoek

The unspeakable is said, the unthinkable is thought. Deeply lived evocation around the universal theme of impermanence. This remains haunting. - Nicole

No less than brilliant! A wonderful start to 2012... - Edwin

This is a performance you undergo and in which you under-go. SUBLIEM! - Moniek

Congratulations to Jeroen Brouwers, Judith Vindevogel, François Beukelaers (beautiful articulation of a penetrating text), Stray Dogs (at times minimalist, ethereal, at times brutally confrontational) and the duo of cinematics (composition of imagery is beautifully integrated). A haunting performance. Impressive. - Gilbert, former RITS lecturer

I still experience the afterglow of the performance every day, it was hauntingly delivered, the lyrics, the content it was very experientially passed on (...) - Kris

A performance that compels afterthoughts and reflection afterwards. Thank you, Walpurgis, you managed to touch us. - Reading club Kalliope

Deeply impressed! - Hilde & Maggy