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Short view on career
Luk Perceval (born in 1957) was raised in a family of skippers that settled in port town Antwerp. Perceval
calls himself a child of football. From his nine until his seventeen, his main interest was football. In later
years Perceval will reflect on this sport as the inspirational source for many of his ideas on theatre and
life. Instead of a career as a professional footballplayer Perceval opts for an acting career. After three
years of study at the renowned Conservatorium of Antwerp Perceval signs a contract with KNS in 1980,
an institute comparable to the National Theatre in London. Quite soon Perceval gets to play leading roles.
But he doesn't feel very happy at KNS. After 4 years he draws his conclusion and starts his own company
in 1984: Blauwe Maandag Companie ("Blue Monday Company) which aim it is to fight against "dead
tales that make the classical playhouse smell of mortuaries."
Perceval's hallmark throughout his career is his particular attention for language. Perceval opts for "an
empty theatre of language". Via language we get to contemporary writers. Quite often Perceval engages
contemporary writers to write new plays or to radically adapt existing plays. Throughout his career
Perceval worked on texts by Shakespeare, Tsjechow, Noren, Wedekind, O'Neill, Strindberg, Fosse…
The 1997 production of Ten Oorlog combines all the different aspects of human existence that were dealt
with in plays such as All for love, Joko, Voader, O'Neill. This is a theatrical marathon of 10 hours, based
on the Wars of the Roses by William Shakespeare. Perceval and Flemish writer Tom Lanoye worked two
years on the adaptation. They left out a lot of the original text and distilled a two-layered story: on the one
hand the complete story of human existence from birth till death and on the other hand the history of
Western society. A hallucinating undertaking. But not without success! Having played to huge audiences
in Flanders and the Netherlands, after having been selected for the Dutch Theatrefestival Perceval was
asked by the Salzburger Festspiele and the Schauspielhaus Hamburg to start a German version of Ten
Oorlog: Schlachten!. This production was later on selected for the Theatertreffen where it received the
Innovationspreis.
Apart from the successful artistic aspect of this production we also have to draw attention to Ten Oorlog
as pivoting point. Farewell en grandeur to BMCie and colourful start to Het Toneelhuis – a merger
between BMCie and the former KNS, which Perceval left in 1984 - of which Perceval is the artistic
director since its start in 1997.
"Het Toneelhuis has to become a theatre house that asserts itself in the cultural landscape by reacting
against everything that is mainstream. It has to become a house where experiment, risk and guts towards
the artform theatre is translated on the stage."