​​

"Meisje, meisje, als je valt, altijd iets van maken." 

- Sonia Gaskell - 

​

​​

​

​

Miss sympathie begins from a family history shared by my sister and me, but remembered and lived from different positions. The work questions who can tell such a story when it belongs to more than one person, and what happens when that story enters the theatre.

 

This question is complicated by the different positions my sister Li and I occupy today. I enter the work as an artist and director. I have learned the language through which a personal history can be contextualized and made legible within a cultural institution. To a certain extent, I can also step in and out of the identity through which that history is read. Li’s trajectory has been different. Part of her adolescence was spent in closed institutions, which interrupted her access to education. Today she is a single mother and factory worker; in her free time, she pole dances. She does absolutely not understand herself through the categories of difference through which a theatre institution might read her. In some respects, she experiences her own life as less exceptional than I have learned to understand mine: not because her position is

socially neutral, but because she has a different relation to the institutional and cultural languages that name certain lives as marginal, diverse or underrepresented.

 

Placing us both on stage does not resolve this asymmetry. It makes it part of the form. In doing so, miss sympathie puts pressure on a tension within contemporary theatre: between the desire for greater diversity and representation, and the desire for work that appears authentic.

 

This is where the work encounters a problem described by theatre critic Charlotte De Somviele in De tranen van Diderot. Writing about the prominence of hyper-personal trauma and vulnerability in contemporary theatre, De Somviele questions what happens when the proximity

between performer and lived experience becomes so strong that theatrical and critical distance seem to disappear. Rather than opposing authenticity to theatrical construction, she argues for the importance of mediation: personal material can gain force precisely through composition, abstraction and distance. Miss sympathie takes this problem one step further. What happens when the person whose lived experience produces this authenticity does not occupy the same position as the artist who knows how to turn it into theatre?

 

Li dances while I direct. This relationship gives another meaning to a phrase attributed to choreographer and ballet pedagogue Sonia Gaskell: Meisje, meisje, als je valt, altijd iets van maken. A dancer learns how to turn a fall into a movement, so that the interruption becomes

part of the choreography. In miss sympathie, however, the question is also who gets to make something out of whose fall. Li performs the movement, while I occupy the position from which it becomes part of an artwork. This asymmetry becomes particularly visible because the roles cannot simply be reversed. Li’s presence gives the work something I cannot produce through representation alone: her body, her history and her relation to that history. At the same time, putting Li on stage does not simply “give her a voice.” She already has one.

 

The more difficult question is who constructs the conditions under which that voice becomes theatre. This shifts Diderot’s problem in another direction. The history at the centre of miss sympathie belongs to both Li and me, yet we do not have the same mobility in relation to it. I can be part of that history while also occupying the position of its artist, contextualising and circulating it within a cultural institution. I can therefore be marked by this history without being confined to the identity through which it becomes culturally legible.

 

Miss sympathie does not offer Li’s presence as proof of authenticity, nor does it pretend that the difference between us can be repaired through representation. Instead, that difference becomes visible within a story that belongs to both of us. The question is not simply who has the right to tell it, but what happens when the same history acquires different artistic, social and economic value depending on who tells it, who performs it, andwho is given the position to make something out of it. In doing so, the work also turns this question towards the cultural institution itself: how can its desire for diversity remain attentive to the inequalities it may reproduce when particular identities and lived experiences become conditions of visibility and cultural value? And for whom is this visibility produced? When diverse or marginalised experiences are presented to a predominantly non-diverse audience, there is a risk that lived experience becomes something to witness, consume or learn from. The demand for representation can then place the burden of education and emancipation

on those being represented, rather than on an audience willing to question its own position. Miss sympathie asks how theatre can make these experiences visible without reducing them to evidence, instruction or the spectacle of vulnerability. At the same time, the artistic research

therefore becomes a search for how to contribute to this ambition without reproducing the mechanisms it questions.

​

​

​

A narrative 

 The village where we live consists mainly of farmers, but our father is a “swan” — a traffic police officer on a motorbike. He often suffers from sleepwalking. Sometimes it happens that at 5 a.m. he puts on his police uniform, helmet included, and wanders through the house. To prevent him from doing anything dangerous, our mother lifts him up while he is still asleep and carries him upstairs, back into the bedroom. Like newlyweds carrying each other over the threshold, but with a helmet. And more often. You might think that is love.

 

In 1993, Rani De Coninck wins the Miss Belgium beauty pageant. Another 26-year-old girl in a purple wool sweater and blonde highlights misses out on the title. She is crowned “Miss Sympathy” — a title awarded to the most sympathetic contestant. Our father finds her so sympathetic that he leaves our home and rents an apartment with her overlooking the sea. Sometimes he pushes her onto the kitchen table and she pulls her perfect legs up and wraps them around him. They laugh and kiss with tongues while the sea crashes heavily against the quay in the background. My sisters and I have never seen anything so romantic. Except in The Sound of Music, when Maria blushes while looking into the captain’s eyes as they waltz at a Nazi party — and that is definitely love.

​

When Li is six, she uses a stolen key to open the candy cupboard and scoops out the homemade advocaat made by our mother. Interrupted by a strange sound, she walks to the corner window and sees a giant helicopter-like object descending straight from the sky, as if trying to land in the garden. It occasionally jerks back up into the air, coming dangerously close to the side wall of the house. Stuttering, the machine touches the ground, exactly on the spot where the sandbox used to be. For a moment, nothing happens. Everything stands still, except the freshly cut grass. Then the helicopter door opens, and our father steps out, bent over. He waves happily at her. Li looks at our mother, who has come to stand next to her, mouth slightly open. She does not smile. She orders all curtains to be closed and everyone to stay inside. For once, we are allowed to touch the ivory-white curtains with our fingers.

​

On December 10, 2022, De Morgen ran the headline: “Six former board members of Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) have been ordered by the Ghent Court of Appeal to pay damages totaling 655 million euros, to be distributed among approximately 4,000 civil parties. Years ago there were more than 10,000, but 20 years have passed: people have died, and others have given up. The only defendants still held jointly liable are the six board members who were also convicted of fraud. Alongside Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie, these include Nico Willaert, Gaston Bastiaens, Carl Dammekens, and Tony Snauwaert.” The latter is our father.

​

​

Note on the project

​

This project is no longer in development and will not go into production. Following the death by suicide of our third sister, during this development, the work has been put on hold indefinitely. This event fundamentally changed the context and conditions of the project, and made it impossible to continue its development as initially intended. The existing material remains as an archive of a process that is now interrupted and unresolved.

​

 

Credits |
 

concept: Kim Snauwaert

dramaturgy: Simon Baetens

choreography: Charlotte Vanden Eynde
scenography: Ika Schwander
performance: Charlotte Gillain, Hendrik Van Doorn

met de steun van: De Grote Post, C-takt, Monty, De Brakke Grond, CAMPO

een project van Between Us vzw: www.betweenus.be

​

​

​

​

​

​

​