Offbeat theatre company offers uneasy tale of love, loss and fragility

“We took a boat without exactly knowing what direction it would take us,” says Gabriela Carrizo. It’s all part of the organic creative process specific to Peeping Tom.

Carrizo – the Argentinian choreographer you may know from her leading role in Kid, a movie by the Flemish director Fien Troch – co-founded the rather unusual Brussels-based dance and theatre company in 2000 with her partner, Franck Chartier, a former dancer for Maurice Béjart’s Ballet of the 20th Century.

Their new play, Moeder (Mother), the second of their Family trilogy, is a very typical performance for them – meaning it’s a very atypical performance by anyone else’s standards. Once again the duo have succeeded in evoking a weird, imaginative world out of a realistic setting, surprising audiences with their surreal mix of theatre, dance and music that can be horrifying, heart-breaking or hilarious in equal parts.

“We keep changing things,” Carrizo explains, the day after the first round of performances in Brussels’ KVS theatre. Sitting in the audience, she can take that little distance from being the director that she needs to see things from another angle.

“It’s just about seconds,” she says. “In the cinema you can cut, on stage you can’t, and timing is crucial for such a fragile play as Moeder.”

Stage as museum

From her place in the audience, she was surprised to hear people laughing. “We didn’t see that coming,” she admits. “It was really meant to be a drama,” Chartier agrees.

They always end up somewhere between laughter and tears, and the laughter often appears to cover the audience’s unease. In this case, it happened during the death of the eponymous mother. On stage, it is symbolised by a funeral service, but it’s made tangible by the hurt a mother feels when she is forbidden to touch her own child, who has to grow up in an incubator.

“That’s the real tragedy of the play: Mother and child can never be one again,” Carrizo says. “In real life, the opposite exists, too. Sometimes an overprotective mother cannot let go.”

Despite a chaotic atmosphere, everything in Moeder is skilfully connected. “Take this incubator,” says Carrizo. “It’s also a way to show things, like a display, so it’s a perfect fit for the setting of the play: a museum.” By making the stage a museum, the director adds another layer to the audience’s viewing experience.

On top of that, nothing in the family-run museum is what you would expect it to be: Sculptures can be real, and frames are not only there to keep the paintings in place. “Museums raise questions about what people want to record or keep, and what will remain of their lives,” says Carrizo.

It’s a clear nod to the concept of memory, something that was tackled in Vader (Father, 2014), the first part of the trilogy directed by Chartier, which was set in a retirement home.

Big issues

He says it was important this time for his partner to be in charge, since she understands how it feels to lose a mother, as well as to be one herself. “The biggest challenge for the third part of the trilogy, Kinderen (Children), will be to show what children and teenagers feel not from an adult perspective, but to stick as close as possible to the emotional world of the child.”

Uma, the couple’s daughter (who starred in their 2004 play Le Salon) will be 15 when they launch Kinderen in 2018. “Peeping Tom has always tackled big issues in life, such as birth, love, loss and death,” says Chartier, “but we take small, familiar interactions between people as a starting point.”

In fact, he continues, “we see our performances as installations, in which we try to fully include the audience. The ultimate goal is to be in the same story. For that, we always create a parallel mental world alongside a realistic stage set. By zooming into the heads of our players and dancers, we show what’s inside, mixing the real with the unreal and the surreal.”

Given the international approval, it seems that audiences all over the world feel the need to be destabilised from time to time.

Moeder (in English) runs in Antwerp and Genk this month and in Bruges next April. Photo: Herman Sorgeloos