The moment we knew nothing about each other

A colourful, Ensorian revue about a square in the city and the people who live on it

Last season the theatre-maker Ruud Gielens from Brussels directed a memorable work entitled Het moment waarop we niets van elkaar wisten (The moment we knew nothing about each other), produced by the Kaaitheater. In this wordless play by the Austrian writer Peter Handke, a cast of about 300 people appear on stage only to disappear soon afterwards. It is as if Handke sat down at the side of a square in the city, noted down the passers-by and then gave his imagination free rein to make hay with these visual impressions.

Together with the composer Jan Goovaerts and costume designer Ann Weckx, Ruud Gielens sought his way through Handke’s innumerable and very detailed stage directions. The result was an extraordinarily vital, amusing and colourful production that sketches an episode in the lives of a number of ‘inhabitants living on a square’, supplemented with a whole range of passers-by whose presence may be purely coincidental or not. The Kaaitheater’s main theatre was unrecognisably transformed into a city square, and the balcony, the corridors, the control room and the catwalks were taken also over by about thirty acting, singing and dancing performers.

Het moment waarop we niets van elkaar wisten is an ode to the city where everyone tries to mark out and defend their own territory, where, in an effort to survive, people strike out in anger and even steal from others, and yet are moved to silence by a moment of tenderness or when they become aware of the proximity of death. At the end the stage is empty save for the rubbish and filth that has been left lying there; the traces of those who passed by and lived here very briefly.

Het moment waarop we niets van elkaar wisten was very well received by both the press and the public. Don’t miss this rerun!