© Jan Lietaert
Reviews
The splendour of change ****, De Standaard (BE)
: “Meierhans for president? (...) Everyone can ask questions, Meierhans has a sound answer to everything. He convinces you; also of the lack of democracy in our current particracy. Afterwards no one is discussing acting skils. This show realizes that which in theatre is sometimes a mere sales pitch: artists think an alternative.”
Meierhans‘ broken Clay Pots, E-tcetera (BE)
: “What initially comes across as a joke develops into the core of a system that starts making more and more sense, slide after slide, argument after argument. (...) Precisely because of this meticulous balance of seriousness, consistence and playfulness Meierhans succeeds in starting off a provoking brain exercise.”
© Luca Mattei
Interview with Bart Capelle
The work of Christophe Meierhans often involves interventions in everyday life, aimed at revealing and confusing social codes, unspoken agreements and norms. Some use for your broken clay pots will be a theatre piece that is part of a triptych, revolving around one challenging proposal: a new constitution for modern-day democracies.
BC: What made you want to create a new constitution? And in what sense will it be different from democracy?
I want to find a way of uncovering some of our a priori assumptions as westerners, who have been living in democracies for a long time. We have the idea that we are living in a state structure that has existed forever. By the most critical it is considered the least bad system and by the less critical the only possible way of living a good life in a community. Through theatre I want to find a way of making these firm unquestioned convictions visible and mobile again. A constitution is the basic contract between all citizens in a society, serving as the measure for every decision and every judgment. Modern democracies are based on elections as the organizing principle to transcribe the will of citizens into the institutions that govern them. As an exercise – and in the first instance just for the hell of it - I want to reverse this principle and devise an imaginary constitution that is not based on election (voting based on promises for the future) but on disqualification (elimination based on past actions).
BC: What made you decide to use it as the basis for a theatre piece?
If you propose a new fictional model to people in a political context, you have to deal with judgment, doubt, fears and resistance. The framework of theatre works in completely the opposite way. People go to theatre with a willingness to believe in the fiction that is presented. Combining both worlds enables you to make use of a theatre audience’s desire to believe in a story. And in this particular case the story told, is the proposal of a new constitution. The ‘trick’ probably boils down to this: you do not have to make people believe in the constitution, you have to make them believe in the fiction. The constitution is a story and every story has a kind of moral or ethical background or a connection to reality. What do you do with this story when you are back in the real world? I hope it will reveal that the real constitution we have is also a fiction, an invention. It was constructed some time ago and is just a tool as any other.
BC: What happens if you discover gaps or loopholes in the constitution while performing the piece?
In the first place, the ambition is to prepare the constitution in such a way that all the possible gaps are covered. The audience is there to challenge the constitution and the fiction that is in place. And again, I think that this is a very normal aspect of theatre. The audience is challenging the fiction. A good theatre piece should be able to incorporate these challenges. But the constitution as a basic script can be improved, that’s for sure. If there are better suggestions, there is no reason not to make amendments.
BC: Where does the title Some use for your broken clay pots come from?
The accepted beginnings of democracy are commonly situated in classical Athens, 5 BC. The ancient Greeks actually despised the idea of elections. They considered it completely undemocratic. To control their representatives they used a system called ostracism. Each year citizens could decide to ban someone from the city, for instance because that person was considered dangerous or a bad influence on the politics of the city. It is difficult to imagine in this day and age, but this banishment was not actually considered a punishment. It was just a measure to neutralize someone for a while. The banned person’s goods were preserved and could be recovered upon return some ten years later. The term ostracism supposedly refers to the procedure of anonymous voting, in which the names of people to be cast away were engraved on either oyster shells (Greek: ostreon) or pieces of broken clay (ostraka). This inspired me for the title of the play. Broken clay pots are also considered useless, garbage. But we can actually reuse them, just as we can recycle the idea of positive disqualification.
BIO CHRISToPHE MEIERHANS
°1977, Geneva, Switzerland, lives and works in Brussels.
He works with and within performances, public spaces, theater, installations, sound, music and video. His work consists mainly in developping strategies for interventions in our daily life protocols through manipulating conventional agreements, social habits or simple usages. Fragments of reality such as an existing speech, a café, a theater performance or our daily audiophily become frameworks for artistic operations which attempt to redirect banality so as to only let it reappear under peculiar angles. His work raises questions of norms and conventions by confusing casual contexts with another and confronting the spectator with some kind of otherness, the strangeness of being in the “wrong” place, or of the place itself being the “wrong” one.
www.contrepied.de