Watching the Light

Would you speak to me a bit about your artistic backgrounds, what drew you initially to theatre making, and what is it about this discipline that holds so much meaning for you?

EZRA: I started studying fine arts in Utrecht, and there I became very interested in installation making. Very quickly I had the desire to work with the spectator in these installations, really having the point of view of sitting there.

After I graduated at the Academy in Gent, I met Bosse, and then we were talking about how I always made installations with light as the subject. Light had also been an important factor in Bosse’s performances at that point, and so we started exploring this shared fascination for light as a protagonist in the theatre in Matisklo (2018), for which I did the light design and scenography. We quickly felt that this wasn’t a director-lighting designer collaboration. After Matisklo, we started working as a duo, and that's already been for five years or six years now?

BOSSE: As a duo, I think our first project together was SUN-SET, in 2020. It was also a performance- installation for the black box.

I have more of a background in theatre: I started acting and performing when I was eight years old. So there was just the joy of being on stage that was the basis for me when starting out. Related to what we're doing right now, I have a strong fondness for being offstage, standing behind curtains and peeking at the audience–the theatre setting feeling like a portal to different worlds. The magic of the theatre in a very classical sense– how it can evoke these worlds–is something that I felt very strongly as a child and really liked.

“It is this desire to be in a space and not to be sure how you're being addressed…but to go on an adventure with your own spectatorship.”

That also resonates with how we try to use the machinery, the technical apparatus of the theatre to evoke environments. A central feature of our practice is that a new work always starts from an imagination about a certain environment and then a certain spectatorship that comes with it. It is this desire to be in a space and not to be sure how you're being addressed, to be invited to explore while not feeling too self-conscious, but to go on an adventure with your own spectatorship.

EZRA: A thing that we really like about making a performance is duration. I love that about performance and theatres and black boxes. I really like that you can take the time to build something with your audience. This was a thing that frustrated me with exhibitions; it was really a problem for me that on average spectators look at a work for nine seconds and keep going.

“The joy of taking your spectators hostage. Ah yes, I love that.”

BOSSE: The joy of taking your spectators hostage. Ah yes, I love that. There’s a responsibility that comes with that, of course. I think attention is also a major topic of how we think about approaching our work. Theatres for us are places where we can explore different regimes of attention and where you can actually give someone a different way of experiencing time and space.

EZRA: Yeah, it also becomes more and more of a powerful place because also there are no phones and it's like…where does this exist nowadays?

Would you also tell me a little more about different types of theatre spaces, working with the black box vs the main stage, for example?

EZRA: The apparatus of a big theatre is amazing. It's an amazing machine to work with. 

But certainly, there's an intimacy to the black box that you lose with that big stage, right?

EZRA: Yeah, so that's why we really love the combination. We did a piece for a large stage, Indoor Weather, and are making plans to do that again in a couple of years. The project we are making now is indeed more intimate. We try to get people to a state of mind similar to being in bed, waking, and watching shapes of light on the ceiling when cars pass by. I really like a small group being on stage, and that you are in the space together.

I want to ask you more about your collaboration as artists. What is it about working in tandem versus alone that you love and that aliments your creativity?

EZRA: I really think that theatre or making performances is steeped in a conversation. And actually, I think we really have the same desires in making art and what we find important. So as a duo, we really understand each other very quickly.

BOSSE: And at the same time, having very different expertises or different sensibilities.

EZRA: Yeah, so in our performance now, Bosse is working a lot with the text, but the main work we do all together. At the same time, I'm more involved in the light installation, the precise light installation and how to install it in the venue.

BOSSE: Yeah, on the conceptual level, I think we very much develop things together, both text wise and light wise. But then indeed, when it comes to the working–and that's more of a recent thing–we also have started dividing it a bit more. It is actually nice to have the freedom to work something out yourself, to make an active proposition to the other person instead of deciding every single thing together.

EZRA: Yeah, and making art by yourself is also very lonely sometimes. So I like that you can share the work and also feel the importance of that, creating in the best way possible together. So it's really special actually if you can, I think, find someone that wants to make the same work as you. 

Tell me about the text you wrote, Ezra, about the American experimental filmmaker, Stan Brakhage. You've both spoken about how this filmmaker is a theoretical basis for your creations. Would you speak more to that and situate this piece within that context?

EZRA: Yeah, in our first piece SUN-SET,  we really worked a lot with Stan Bakhage as inspiration. For instance, he has a movie called The Text of Light, which is really beautiful. And it's just random things around him, filmed through a crystal ashtray. It’s a journey he undertakes to explore all these different textures of light and different colours. You see differently after watching his work, you start noticing different nuances and textures in light. And in SUN-SET we also worked a lot with this idea.

BOSSE: Yeah, the kind of de-automisation of seeing somehow. Put in a more prosaic way, he actually breaks down the medium of film to its essence, namely the projection of light and colour. And indeed there was also something he said in an interview that triggered us, which was that very often we treat light as merely something that bounces off objects. But actually, through the camera, he tries to break down or de-automate our way of seeing the world.

That's something that attracts us. I think, in a similar way, we try to use the apparatus of the theatre to put focus on how theatre functions, and how the theatre apparatus can work in the same way as Brakhage tries to do with film and cinema. Because we’re missing out on a lot if we don’t observe how we construct our realities. 

Lovely, thank you. Relating to this, I see a distinction you make between signification and a raw immediacy of light–a sort of visual language without a thought process attached to it. I was comparing this in my mind to the difference between thinking and feeling. Does that comparison resonate with you?

BOSSE: Yeah, specifically in this work, I think it's been a big search for us. The text of this performance is about consciousness and animal consciousness. Our poetics is very much aimed at creating strong sensory experiences and a very intuitive way of being in space or being in a state of being hypnotised, so it’s challenging to combine that with language, because the desire to interpret sometimes contradicts that more intuitive state.
We've tried to work with poetry a lot already in the past. And there we’re also looking to bring these things together without, as a spectator, having to switch between different modes–being in a more analytical mindset, or ‘just experiencing’. So I think that's an ongoing search also in our work.

That also brings me to your title, which I wanted to ask you about, and it's interesting you spoke about working with poetry; something about it made me think of Louise Glück's poetry–The Wild Iris. 

BOSSE: Yeah, someone proposed to work with her poetry once a couple of years ago! I was into other stuff at the time, but I should check it out sometime.

I'm intrigued by “a pulse with no body, a sun with no sky.” Could you speak to this title, what inspired it, what it means to you?

EZRA: Yeah, so for us this is an interesting line on different levels. It's from a poem by Inger Christensen. We’ve already worked a lot with her poems, actually.

BOSSE: A Danish poet. Yeah, she's great. The poem is from a volume of poetry called Det which translates as “It."

EZRA: In that book, she tries to talk about ‘everything that is’.

BOSSE: Yeah, to write down the entire cosmology of the world. And it's also thematizing what language can evoke and the limits of language–she uses very strict formal rules in its different parts.

EZRA: More concretely, I think this was interesting for us because when we started working on the installation, for the light design we were working with the idea of an artificial sunrise and sunset.. And at the same time, there were no performers in the installation, it's only pre-recorded text that you hear, so there is no “pulse”, you can say. So this is very concrete for me as to why I really liked it too.

BOSSE: In terms of the text, it's also about consciousness . The main inspiration text-wise was a book called Metazoa by a philosopher of sciences, Peter Godfrey-Smith. He has a nuanced, rather materialist view on consciousness. But in this book, he also discusses radical philosophical ideas, like for example a universal consciousness underlying everything, and that actually consciousness is the underlying basis of the universe and that matter is like a pictogram on your computer screen. Yeah, consciousness being the basis of everything or otherwise, yeah, that also sort of resonates with this title.

Any last remarks or things you want to share?

EZRA: It's not always easy to make your own work, because of so many practical and financial circumstances. But I really am grateful to work in Belgium, because we are making experimental work and we are trying, with an audience, to rethink and open things up, and there’s not that many places in the world where you can do this with decent institutional and governmental support. I feel that this system is under serious pressure, so I hope that experimental practices will not be pushed to the fringe. I find the artistic ecosystem in Belgium such support enables really special and precious, and for that you really do need strange, boring and wonderful experiments.