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Contemporary Theatre ReviewPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gctr20

The Hybridization of Flemish Identity: The FlemishNational Heritage on the Contemporary StageKarel Vanhaesebrouck aa Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences , Maastricht University , P.O. Box 616, 6200 MDMaastricht, The NetherlandsPublished online: 27 Jan 2011.

To cite this article: Karel Vanhaesebrouck (2010) The Hybridization of Flemish Identity: The Flemish National Heritage onthe Contemporary Stage, Contemporary Theatre Review, 20:4, 465-474, DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2010.505760

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2010.505760

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The Hybridization of FlemishIdentity: The Flemish NationalHeritage on the ContemporaryStage

Karel Vanhaesebrouck

Belgitude and Flemishness: An Uneasy Cultural Heritage

Ever since the proclamation of the Kingdom of Belgium in 1830, therehave been political demands to recognize an independent Flemishidentity. Over time, the mere claim of a specific ‘Flemish’ identity hascome to agitate the minds of Belgians. The first decade of the twenty-firstcentury has seen politicians within both the Dutch- and the French-speaking regions hopelessly trying to solve the so-called communityquestion, as they have been trying in vain to do for several decades. It hasbecome the Gordian knot at the very heart of Belgian interior politics. Ithas been encapsulated in the infamous (and as yet unsolved) ‘BHV’ courtcase, the problematic attempts to reshape the electoral constituency ofBrussels-Halle-Vilvoorde that have fuelled the success of nationalistparties both on the Flemish side – initially the right-wing Vlaams Belangand now, with increasing success, the Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie (NVA) –and on the French-speaking Walloon side, with the Front Democratiquedes Francophones (FDF). These parties canvass independence for theirlinguistic community, albeit in different degrees and forms, ranging fromplain separatism to increased self-government. The issue, far beyondpolitics, has also shaped the cultural imagination on both sides of thelinguistic border. At the same time, these debates become ever more

Karel Vanhaesebrouck. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University, P.O.Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands.Email: k.vanhaesebrouck@maastrichtuniversity.nl

Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 20(4), 2010, 465–474

Contemporary Theatre Review ISSN 1048-6801 print/ISSN 1477-2264 online� 2010 Taylor & Francis http://www.informaworld.com

DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2010.505760

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dissociated from the hybrid and multicultural reality of contemporaryBelgium, where, in Brussels alone, no less than forty-six per cent of thepopulation is of foreign origin.1 The notion of ‘Belgitude’, as Jan Baetenshas expressed it, is

a sort of stopgap that allows the Belgians to name the feeling of belonging to

a country that does not exist, that is not a country because it is not united, to

have the impression of participation in a culture that is characterized by

emptiness, a void, an absence, in short, to live in a country where there are

Belgians of course, but where Belgium as a nation (on a psychological level)

and also as a state (on a political and administrative level) is lacking.2

And still, the idea of a pristine Flemish cultural identity remains asprominent in many current debates as it always has been throughout therelatively short history of Belgium. Against this background, youngDutch-speaking theatre directors have begun to reconsider their identityas well as the historical trajectory of these discursive formations in theirwork. This article will focus on Oom Toon (Uncle Toon, 2007), a triptychdirected by Rieks Swarte based on particular events from Flemish theatrehistory, and on Singhet ende Weset vro (Sing and Be Merry, 2006) byRuud Gielens and his company Union Suspecte, a production inspired bya traditional Flemish songbook of the same name. Both productions inan exemplary way revisit past and present processes of identity formationin Flanders in an attempt to create a theatre repertoire for a country thatdoes not have its own canon of works. They challenge problematiccategories that are at the structural heart of political and culturaldynamics in Belgium, and invite a new attitude towards the nation’shistory and cultural heritage, which are no longer by default shared by allBelgian citizens: they present moments of (often forgotten or obscured)heritage of Flemish theatre and popular performance culture, notreconstructing them but proposing them as stepping stones for a new,shared historical awareness.3

To fully grasp the ideological dramaturgy that underpins both OomToon and Singhet, it is necessary to briefly map some aspects of Flemishtheatre and wider cultural history, with its lack of its own textual canon,and its intricate relation to the socio-political context. It is important tobear in mind that the Flemish cultural tradition does not constitute a lieude memoire as is the case with the French classicistic repertoire, or withShakespeare.4 French Classicism and Shakespeare have become institu-tionally acknowledged models, though certainly not unambiguous, partsof a sanctified cultural heritage that triggers respect or provocativecontest. The relation to the Flemish dramatic tradition is far morecomplex and contradictory. During the second half of the nineteenthcentury, the Belgian socio-linguistic divide did not follow the presentterritorial regions of Flanders and Wallonia (many francophones lived inFlanders), but expressed instead class strata and ideologies. French was,at the time, a means of social distinction for the cultured and educatedclasses, a sign of social superiority (one should remember Ghent-bornmodernist Maurice Maeterlinck as an example). For most Flemings,‘Belgian-ness’ therefore remains associated with francophone ideas. Into

1. Eric Corijn and EefjeVloeberghs, Brussel!(Brussels: VUBPress,2009), p. 32.

2. Jan Baetens, MiekeBleyen, Hilde VanGelder, ‘Ya-t-il unephotographie‘‘belge’’’,Contemporary FrenchCivilization, vol. 33,issue 1, pp. 157–177(157). All translationsfrom the Flemish andFrench are my own.

3. For this article, I haverevisited my reflectionsin ‘Le patrimoineflamingant sur la sceneflamandecontemporaine.Reconstruction oudeconstructionidentitaire?’ (in‘Memoires de l’oubli.Aux marges durepertoire del’Antiquite a nosjours’, EtudesTheatrales, 44–45(2009), 159–68). Iwould like to thankthe editors of thepresent volume,Lourdes Orozco andPeter M. Boenisch, fortheir useful comments.

4. For French historianPierre Nora, a lieu dememoire can take theform of a monument,an artefact, an archive,a person, a symbol, oran event; it can bematerial or immaterial.It triggers emotionalresponses for a specificcommunity, whetherthese feelings arepositive (as with theFrench Revolution) ornegative (e.g. the warin Algeria). See PierreNora (ed.), Les lieux dememoire, 3 vols (Paris:Gallimard, 1984–1993).

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the inter-war period of the twentieth century, writing in Dutch instead ofin the ‘cultivated’ French was a political act, which also expressed anemancipatory (and not at all automatically reactionary) desire. At thecentre of many Flemish plays throughout the nineteenth century was aFlemish past that was partly historical and partly imagined. Often showinga surprising defence of bourgeois morality, while also often expressinganticlerical sentiments in the highly religious society, playwrights used thegenre of the historical drama to comment on the present withoutexplicitly attacking the French-speaking hegemony. Writers such as FransGrittens (De Geuzen [The Protestants], 1874), Karel Ondereet (DeKrankzinnige van Leiden [The Lunatic of Leiden], 1862) or HippolietVan Peene in his Mathias de Beeldstormer (Mathias the Iconoclast, 1858)all reflect this particular sensibility. Albrecht Rodenbach’s Gudrun (1878)was one of the most lyrical and exuberant proclamations of a new Flemishethical community, while Alfred Hegenscheidt’s Starkadd (1898), whichgave vital impulses to Flemish theatre, was one of the few plays thatsurvived its own time. For these authors, in their individual ways, a newcultural and linguistic self-consciousness prompted a somewhat idealistvision of a political future for Flanders.

This entire corpus fell into oblivion after the Second World War. It wasonly at this time that the Flemish movement, many of whose adherentshad collaborated with the Nazi occupation during the war, progressivelyradicalized. The initial call for emancipation gave way to conservative,reactionary or extreme right-wing ideology. As a consequence, especiallyof the collaboration, the call for Flemish emancipation has come to beregarded as politically suspect ever since. Flemish plays, in particular thosehistorical plays of the nineteenth century mentioned above, could nolonger be considered without bringing to mind the disastrous con-sequences of nationalism that manifested itself in the Second World War.As a result, Flemish playwriting, which for a long time fed from theemancipatory, nationalist movement, became torn between an inclinationto forget and a desire to commemorate its political connotations. Today,any explicit reference to ‘Flemishness’ will be associated with right-wingnationalism. To choose this cultural legacy as a starting point for thecreation of new works, as Gielens and Swarte did, is therefore(notwithstanding its specific individual intentions) an eminently politicalgesture. Both directors aimed to resituate the artistic heritage, and not bedetermined by it. They share the central challenge for artists engagingwith this problematic history and heritage, which is to escape the deadlockof either ignoring or embracing, of either oblivion or commemoration.

The solution they offer is, however, quite different. Rieks Swarte tookon the challenge of the project by taking a play from the 1920s as astarting point and exposing all the Flemish-nationalist fantasies of thatparticular epoch which the text incorporates. His Oom Toon reconstructsboth a specific event in Flemish theatre history and the lives of severalreal-life cultural protagonists of that era. Ruud Gielens, on the otherhand, related to the tradition of national song festivals, using a songbookas starting point for creating Singhet ende weset vro. The productiondeconstructs this heritage by exposing its problematic political ideology,leaving the irony and communal values that are also present in these

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songs aside. Gielens also directly incorporates the multi- andintercultural reality of present-day Belgium. Both productions emergedfrom a working group established by the Koninklijke VlaamseSchouwburg (KVS) in Brussels. Under the name Skilt en vriend[Shield and friend],5 the group of playwrights, directors and otherartists presented in the course of three theatre seasons between 2001and 2004 readings of Flemish dramatic literature, which until thenhad occupied a rather peripheral position within the contemporarytheatre discourse. The authors presented included Albrecht Roden-bach, Cyriel Verschaeve, Hippoliet Van Peene, Herman Teirlinck andHugo Claus. Simultaneously, the group studied theatrical as well asnon-theatrical texts referring to less glorious episodes of Flanders’ andBelgium’s history, such as the collaboration with the Nazi regime andthe country’s colonial past. This project is representative of theactivities of the KVS, which, situated in the middle of a postmoderncity as a flagship cultural institution, explicitly seeks to redefine its ownFlemish cultural context in intercultural terms, reflecting the demo-graphics of Brussels and the present-day Flemish population. Amid theongoing political and cultural tensions between the communities, theKVS – which is in its name both royal (koninklijk) and Flemish(vlaams) – has resolutely opted to place at the heart of its work theissue of cultural identity within today’s globalized world in general,and within the specific problematic of the Belgian local context inparticular.

(Re-)Constructing Flemish Theatre History

The starting point for director Rieks Swarte’s Oom Toon (Uncle Toon,2007) was the life of director Anton van de Velde, the brother of hisgrandfather and thus the uncle referred to in the title. With hisinvolvement in the travelling popular company Vlaamsche Volkstoneel(VVT) [Flemish Popular Theatre] in the 1920s, van de Velde played aprominent role in the history of Flemish-language theatre. Swarte’s OomToon is a complex, multi-referential game: its departure point is a specificinstance, van de Velde’s 1925 play Tijl, which represents a key momentof Flemish theatre history as aesthetic innovation and political impetuscame together, and also played a defining role both for the VVT and,from 1924, its successor, the Katholieke Vlaamse Volkstoneel [CatholicFlemish Popular Theatre, KVVT]. The popular KVVT movementmerged in fascinating ways its at times militant Catholic message withexperimental performance aesthetics inspired by expressionism andconstructivism.6 Van de Velde’s Tijl reflects all the characteristicingredients: Catholicism, Flemish militancy, popularism and modernism.It achieved an almost mythical status, largely because of its internationalperformance at the Comedie des Champs Elysees in Paris in June 1927.7

The KVVT’s success, however, was rather short-lived. Its odd unique-ness, the Catholic content mixed with the modernist form, created aninsurmountable tension and brought about its decline, since ‘the publicwished to experience the euphoria of vivid nationalism and a militant

5. During the Brugsemetten [BrugesMornings] of 1302,the question ‘shield orfriend’ was used todistinguish the nativesupporters of theFlemish count fromtheir French-speakingenemy, whopronounced theFlemish word ‘schild’as ‘skilt’.

6. The Flemishmovement, and with itthe ambitions todevelop a Dutch-language theatricalcanon, has from thebeginning beenconnected with aprogramme of ethical-bourgeois education:

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Catholicism, but was not interested in the formal avant-gardism that wasradically opposite to the known models of realism’.8

Oom Toon was conceived as a triptych. The uncle’s actual play, Tijl,featured as a proper reconstruction in the middle section of Swarte’sproduction, for which the audience had to move to the second stage ofthe KVS. Around it, the director presented what was simultaneously ahistorical drama, a family history, an individual portrait, and an epistolarynovel. He specifically drew on letters that Anton van de Velde sent to hisbrother (Swarte’s own grandfather), Jos De Klerk, which the director hadfound in his grandfather’s library. For the production, he reinvented themissing responses to this correspondence. Amongst his grandfather’spapers, Swarte also found an obscure later play written by ‘Uncle Toon’,entitled Homo Novus. It displays manifestly fascist content and thusprovided an occasion to address that crucial issue of the time whenFlemish idealism slithered into collaboration. Through his uncle’s letters,Swarte also found out more about the life of his grandfather, who was amusic critic and a choirmaster at the time, and who was forbidden topursue his profession after the war.

This biographical and historical episode, spanning the time periodfrom the euphoria provoked by van de Velde’s invitation to write his playfor the KVVT to the schism and the disillusionment before and after theSecond World War, constitutes the narrative backbone of Oom Toon.Personal histories mix with the wider historical context, as Swarte notonly aims for a reconstruction of a specific historical event, but alsoattempts to bring into perspective an episode from Flemish theatrehistory that has been shrouded in legend. The first and third part largelyfollow the correspondence between Jos and Toon (performed by GuyDermul and Willy Thomas, respectively). First, we see how ‘Uncle Toon’manages to survive the atrocities of the trenches in the First World War,falls in love with the nurse Maya, and develops his Flemish self-awarenessin accordance with his profoundly Catholic belief. Swarte’s productioncaptures the optimism and creativity that reigned during the interwarperiod. There is a merry medley of contemporary artistic novelties inrapid succession, from a futuristic recipe for grilled pork in Cologne toBauhaus references, and on to Dadaism and Meyerhold. The moodthen drastically changes in the third part. After the euphoria of Tijl, thedisillusion follows: Van de Velde becomes the leader of a moribundVVT, he fails, writes a Tijl II that turns out to be much more political,harder and more bitter. On the eve of the Second World War,enthusiasm has given way to bitterness. The VVT is in a sorry state andsupport for the Flemish cause has completely vanished. Here, Swartealso inserted a fictitious response from Jos to his brother in which hedisapproves of the fascist content of Homo Novus: ‘One begins with aninferiority complex, which transforms itself into arrogance and ends asintolerance’.9

Between these two parts, the audience saw a reconstruction of Tijl asthe play was conceived by Johan De Meester and his designer ReneMoulaert in 1927, including its set, its grotesque acting and itsexpressionist costumes. Van de Velde stated about Tijl, his idealisticactivist in the Flemish cause who is his play’s protagonist:

bourgeois virtues andcommon decency wereperceived as a coreaspect of the ‘Flemishspirit’, in contrast tothe alleged decadenceof the French-speakingclasses. A key role inthis context was playedby Oscar de Gruyter,who propagated theuse of the Dutchlanguage as aninstrument for populareducation, and whoseinfluence was felt inFlanders until the1950s. In 1909 deGruyter founded theVlaamsche Vereenigingvoor Toneel- envoordrachtkunst(Flemish Associationfor Theatre andDeclamation),bringing classicrepertoire pieces tocities and villages inFlanders, often inopen-air locations thatwere easily accessiblefor a wide public. Hewas then also thedriving force behindthe VVT. After deGruyter’s departure in1924, theorganization, under itsnew artistic leaderJohan De Meester,reoriented its militancytowards Catholicism.

7. See Geert Opsomer,‘Het Vlaamschevolkstoneel en deopvoeringen vanLucifer en Tijl inParijs’, in Eentheatergeschiedenis derNederlanden. Tieneeuwen drama entheater in Nederlanden Vlaanderen ed. byRob L. Erenstein e.a.(Amsterdam:Amsterdam UniversityPress, 1996), pp. 626–31.

8. Frank Peeters,‘Toneel’, inEncyclopedia van deVlaamse Beweging, ed.by Reginald deSchryver e.a. (Tielt:Lannoo, 1998), p.3090.

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I wanted to show the Flemish people and even, if necessary, the Dutch

what goes wrong and what vices modern Flanders suffers from. From the

beginning, Tijl is constructed with violent contrasts: romanticism versus

idealism, symbolism versus realism, satire versus sentimentality.10

Swarte, however, exposed the play’s more embarrassing details: ithighlighted the bursts of Flemish Catholic militancy, the rhythmic yetsometimes mechanically dull verses, and its bad jokes. Swarte attemptedthe precarious balance between homage and parody, with a peculiarresult. The detailed reconstruction emphasizes, above all, the distancebetween the historical theatre practice and that of today. For instance,actor Lucas Smolders purposely upsets the theatrical conventions of thetime by exaggerating the emphatic expressionistic gestures or byironically stressing the artificial nature of the play’s language.Moulaert’s set design, consisting of wooden cubes, surfaces andcatwalks adorned by posters with slogans, allows the actors freedomof movement and conveys a sense of dynamism, restlessness and freneticenergy.

Swarte thus proposes, in the three parts of the production, threedifferent ways of dealing with the past in general and Flemish theatrehistory in particular. In the first part he uses the stories of two privatelives to sketch a historic period; in the second, the reconstruction of Tijlconfronts the spectator with a literal quotation from theatrical historyand thus with the distance that separates the spectator from what is seenon stage. Finally, Swarte suggests a contemporary evaluation of the past,by associating the end of the interbellum period with today. Swartechooses different strategies of actualization in an attempt to merge hishistorical material with our times while at the same time deliberatelyopting for a strategy of historicization: concrete events, whether actual(the representation of Tijl) or semi-fictional (the story of the charactersinvolved), are precisely located in place and time. Through thecombination of van de Velde’s original play with the letters, it becomesclear to a present-day audience how the Catholic and ‘honest’ Flemish

Image 1 ‘Simultaneously emphasizing the similarities and the distance, Oom Toonoscillates between historical documentation and deconstructing the myth of Tijl’. OomToon, directed by Rieks Swarte. Photo: Bart Grietens. Courtesy of KVS.

9. Riek Swarte et al.,Oom Toon, script,Brussels, 2007(unpublished).

10. Bernard VanCausenbroeck, ‘Velde,Anton van de’, inEncyclopedie van deVlaamse Beweging, pp.3177–78 (p. 3177).

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elite of the time dreaded what they perceived as urban degeneration.They were neither able to cope with nor understand the rapidly growingpopular entertainments, its capitalist environment or the wave oftechnological and scientific developments.

Simultaneously emphasizing the similarities and the distance, OomToon oscillates between historical documentation and deconstructing themyth of Tijl. Swarte goes beyond reconstructing a specific historical anddramaturgical tradition. A helpful concept to articulate the dramaturgicstrategies at work here is provided by Dutch philosopher Jos De Mul.Writing on Antigone, he proposed three ways of interpreting Greektragedy, which I find usefully express different approaches to reinterpret-ing theatre history.11 The first approach of reconstruction concentrateson capturing the original significance of the play. De Mul compares thisapproach to that of a restorer who peels away the layers of laterinterpretations and prejudices, hoping to expose the authentic andoriginal work of art. The second strategy is the constructive approachwhich assumes that an interpretation without a predetermined frame ofreference and without prejudice and preconceptions is simply impossible.Here, the horizon of the original work is merged with that of theinterpreter. The third strategy, the deconstructive approach, similarlyacknowledges the contingency of every interpretation, yet it goes furtherby focusing primarily on those elements that escape interpretation:

By revealing this ambiguity, the deconstructive interpretation would like to

achieve a dispersion or a diffusion of the interpretative horizons rather than

a fusion of these horizons, with the only aim being to undermine the

authority of certain modern prejudices and to create a broader view that

allows other modes of interpretation.12

Oom Toon attempts ‘construction’, in De Mul’s sense, as Swarte triesto merge the problems at stake during this specific era with those of ourown times. His production became an attempt to rethink the presentthrough a particular historical reality. Moreover, Swarte not onlyattempted to rediscover and to resituate a rather unknown part ofFlemish theatre history, he also shows how the interwar culture is bothfundamentally different from our times and still relevant to our era. Hemakes clear that, in order to understand the Flemish theatrical heritageand its problematic aspects, a confrontation with its darker, less gloriousepisodes is needed even if they touch upon the presupposed quintessenceof this self-imagined identity.

Resituating the Popular Cultural Heritage

Whereas Oom Toon attempted (quite literally) a reconstruction, RuudGielens’ Singhet ende weset vro (Sing and Be Merry, 2006) leaned towardsDe Mul’s third approach, the strategy of deconstruction: it takes thevarious prejudices of Flemish and Walloon communities towards thisspecific cultural heritage into account, and even deliberately integratesthese. At the same time (and in contrast to Swarte), Gielens and his

11. Jos De Mul,‘Tragischetechnologieen’, inTragisch. Over tragedieen ethiek in de 21ste

eeuw, ed. by PaulVanden Berghe,Willem Lemmens andJohan Taels (Budel:Damon, 2005), pp.87–117. De Mulhimself took hisprompt from T. C. W.Oudemans and A. P.H. Lardinois, TragicAmbiguity:Anthropology,Philosophy andSophocles’ Antigone(Leiden: Brill, 1987).

12. De Mul, ‘Tragischetechnologieen’, p. 93.

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intercultural company Union Suspecte chose a conscious incorporationof elements that are supposedly foreign to Flemish dramaturgy.

Similar to Oom Toon, the production directly connects to an aspect ofpopular performance of Flemish culture from the crucial interwar period.It related to a Flemish tradition of song festivals, a phenomenon whoseexistence is closely entangled with the history of Flemish nationalism.The most famous of these festivals was the Vlaams Nationaal Zangfeest(Flemish National Song Festival), a regular large-scale event between1933 and 1997 intending to teach the national hymns to the masses.Although both public and organisers were a heterogeneous community,bringing together, in the founding years, VNV-militants, leftist advocatesof Flemish cultural emancipation and members of the KatholiekeArbeidersjeugd (Young Catholic Workers’ Association), the festival thenplayed a part in the Nazi collaboration during the war. The size and themonumental aspect of this song festival integrated perfectly into thevisual language of fascism.13 Gielens’ performance drew on Singhet endeweset vro, a songbook of that title that dates back to the interwar period,and as such marks a somewhat unusual choice for a contemporaryexperimental performance company. It allowed them to confront thehistorical past of the Flemish emancipatory movement with thecomplexity of the problems faced by the Belgian community today.Their use of these songs is also an attempt to raise awareness of the linksbetween past and present.

The songs all share romantic, Flemish-nationalist and Catholic ideals,each of them attesting to a – mostly imagined – feeling of unity. This isexactly the sentiment that Ruud Gielens appeals to in his production: hewants to show a present-day audience that, beyond petty politics, thisfeeling persists in contemporary multicultural Belgium. His proposal istwofold: he wants to disclose the romantic nostalgia that is inevitablyconveyed by these songs, and which lives on in a reactionary Flemish self-fashioning, but at the same time, he supports a new and still decidedlyFlemish identity that resolutely integrates the complexity of today’smulti-ethnic society. Gielens mixes symbols constitutive of Flemish self-understanding (the bishop’s Catholic paraphernalia, the conviviality of

Image 2 ‘Singhet was fully about the here and now, putting forward the question ofFlemish identity today’. Singhet ende weset vro, directed by Ruud Gielens. Photo: BartGrietens. Courtesy of KVS.

13. After the war, thefestival focused on theconcrete moot pointsof the Flemishmovement, such asamnesty, federalismand the founding of aDutch-speakinguniversity in Leuven.Later on, it includedbroader themes linkedto cultural policy, suchas the exportation ofFlemish culture andart abroad through theestablishment of the –at that time – heavilycontested ‘CulturalAmbassadors ofFlanders’. In its finalyears, dances and textsof Flemish poets wereinserted amongst thesongs.

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the fireplace, a large dinner table with the mother of the houseseated in the middle, etc.) with typical elements of the song festivals(banner-waving, the communal singing together, etc.). These highlysymbolically charged, prototypical actions and characters have, however,been crucially altered: those who wave the nationalist banners are clearlynot of white European descent; the pompous Catholic bishop is playedby young Moroccan actor Mourade Zeguende, who plays with RomanCatholic paraphernalia but whose language is all but holy; a poem byrenowned writer Guido Gezelle mutates into a hip hop chant to whichdancer Haider Al Timimi breakdances. Gielens thus infuses these signs ofFlemishness with foreign elements. And this is exactly his point: all theseapparently ‘foreign’ elements are now inherently part of a contemporaryFlemish identity, which is not only multicultural, but an interculturalhybrid: the result of a fusion, an interbreeding, rather than representingthe co-existence of separate and distinct identities.

Unsurprisingly, the production’s core issue is this belief in a collectiveidentity. To sing together is to spend time together, to get closer to oneanother, to disappear in the affection of a collective. On a formal level,Gielens consciously chooses a strategy of monumentalization, opting forwide-open spaces and large, emphatic movements. He constructsrecognizable, epic images, playing with group scenes and making useof impressive scenographic arrangements. Members of an archetypalFlemish family assemble around a long and sumptuous dinner table andfireplace, symbolizing conviviality and hospitality. The event thespectators witness blurs the boundaries between public and private.Gielens uses the same strategy as the song festivals: music, performancesand recitations alternate without any narrative pattern and blend into agreat rhythmic, visual and monumental event. Thus the productiondemonstrates the potential impact of immersing public and singers in acollective political ritual that celebrates their shared identity. Gielens ofcourse explicitly refers to the problematical aspects of this identity, too.At a point in the production, the actors start singing the Brabanconne,the Belgian national anthem, and encourage the public to sing along.Those who do so are in the following scene insulted by a Flemish-nationalist character, played by Jeroen Perceval, who embodies allstereotypes of the xenophobic, right-wing racist, crew cut and shorttrousers included. At this moment, some black and North Africanadolescents enter the stage waving flags, referring to old-timenationalism. Throughout the production, any familial harmony getsinstantly disturbed: the spectators are invited to sing to well-knowntraditional, national hymns, while being made aware of the ideologicalcontent of these same songs. Gielens thus manages to bring out thepermanent tension between our wish for solidarity and cohesion, on theone hand, and a profound feeling of identity fragmentation on the other.

With Singhet ende weset vro, the director and his team present acontemporary challenge to the emancipatory tradition of the Flemishmovement: It is a plea to reconsider and to resituate the very idea ofFlemish (and, by extension, of Belgian) identity, taking into account thehybridized, multi-ethnic reality. It is a call to reshape the theatrerepertoire in order to address and include today’s heterogeneous audiences

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by reflecting what ‘being Flemish’ means in this intercultural environment,and to make the cultural heritage newly available to deal with the largegroup of Flemings of foreign descent, achieving integration rather thanexclusion. Foremost, the production articulates the profound necessity of anew Flemish identity, complex and mixed; it is a plea for hybridization asthe only possible solution. With his production, Gielens also revives aforgotten repertoire. By admitting and exposing its problematic politicalconnotations and allowing for ambiguities, he manages to move beyondthe given assumption that this heritage is a monolithic block of bygonerightist ideas. He is instead able to relay, as well, the beauty contained inthese songs despite the inherent links to a nationalist agenda. Here, too,every attempt to forget, obscure or commemorate this problematicheritage is avoided. Gielens endeavours to resituate this heritage, toapproach it from a contemporary and multi-faceted perspective; it is anattempt to redefine Flemish and Belgian identities via their own history, ahistory which has always (but in vain) been in search of its canonical, andthus shared and common, tradition and heritage. In Singhet, the Flemishmovement is characterized by a multiplicity of ideas, tendencies andattitudes. In terms of De Mul’s categories, the production uses thedeconstructive approach: not only does it point to the contingent nature ofidentity, leaving behind traditional assumptions of the one coherent,closed and monolithic stability; it also explicitly pays attention to theemancipatory, community-building, and in an emphatic sense ‘popular’elements of Flemish nationalism.

While Oom Toon evaluated the actual relevance of a specific historicalera and took the distances between yesterday and the present as itsstarting point, Singhet was fully about the here and now, putting forwardthe question of Flemish identity today. In trying to dislodge this questionfrom the confined discourse of Flemish nationalism, Singhet pointed tothose elements that are generally left outside the scope of a contemporaryFlemish self-awareness, without historicizing this idea of a Flemishidentity. Thereby, the two productions proposed two perspectives of thesame contested past. With the reconstruction of Tijl in the middle ofOom Toon, Rieks Swarte tried to fathom the original significance of thismuch-mythologized historic production while also emphasizing thedistance that separates its ideas and its aesthetics from our present-dayreality. He integrated an explicit contemporary perspective into the thirdpart of his play, linking van de Velde’s political orientation to ourpolitical situation. Swarte thus attempted to connect the original contextof his dramaturgical material with the audience’s own situation (DeMul’s ‘constructive’ approach). Although Singhet ende weset vro shares asimilar ambition, Ruud Gielens did not shy away from deconstructing hisown material. He integrated elements that traditionally escaped from acritical perspective on Flemish popular national culture, and that havetherefore remained manifestly absent in the dramaturgic corpus. In thisway, Singhet ende weset vro shows that ‘Flemish’ may in fact well signifyan essentially hybrid and intercultural identity where cultures are fusedand become fundamentally intertwined rather than living as independententities next to one another.

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