Skip to main content
Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles

Jaco Van Dormael

Jimmy Kets

Jaco Van Dormael is known for his award-winning films which are famous throughout the French-speaking world: Toto ce héros, Le huitième jour, Mr. Nobody and Le Nouveau Testament.

Less well known is the fact that, even while he was studying at the INSAS (Brussels) and the École Louis-Lumière (Paris), he was already dividing his time between short films which, because of their brevity, he compares to short stories or songs, and theatre for children, his audience of choice, whose lack of politeness and impertinence he welcomes.

At that time, he could also have become a photographer or a clown.

Having recently returned to the stage and live theatre for the pleasure of collaborating on an artistic project with his long-standing partner, Michèle Anne De Mey, a dancer and choreographer, he also, more recently, joined forces with the writer, storyteller and  humourist, Thomas Gunzig.

Aware of the existing differences between the cinema, a solitary experience where an entirely pre-written script is filmed later, and the theatre, where the rehearsals, drawing on research and improvisations, are more like experiences in collective writing and where the writing is done with and within the material, Jaco Van Dormael also knows that spectators will find things common to both as they move from one art to the other.

Van Dormael likes to let reality come to him and readily quotes Finnish photographer, Pentti Sammallahti: “You don’t take a photo, the photo gives itself to you”.

He also likes to cultivate doubt and for a film or stage play to raise questions without providing answers. He thinks that acts of poetic resistance are needed more than ever now and he yields to the temptation of dreamlike reverie and, willingly, to the appeal of wonder—the  Surrealist notion of the “merveilleux quotidien” (the miraculous in the everyday).

As a film student, he admired the Lumière brothers for their almost naturalist realism, as much as Méliès for his love of fantasy. This may be why he wanted to dramatize the strange and frightening coma Michèle Anne De Mey experienced during her tour in Canada.                                              

Like Dostoevsky, who suffered an epileptic seizure at the same time as receiving an official pardon from the Tsar during a mock execution, Jaco Van Dormael and Michèle Anne De Mey want to explore the realm that lies between life and death, between dream and consciousness, between wakefulness and sleep, a highly ambiguous state on the fringes of life which is disturbing and raises questions uninfluenced by the subjective perception we have of reality.

 

Yannic Mancel

© Gloria Scorier