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Simple as ABC #2: Keep calm & Validate

Thomas Bellinck

How do you get a grip on a complex phenomenon like migration management? How do you delineate a border when it is everywhere? The Belgian dramatist Thomas Bellinck had numerous conversations with border and data managers in control rooms and on the fringes of Europe. With two actors, four musicians from SPECTRA, scenographer Josef Wouters, composer Joris Blanckaert, and ten gigabytes of audio material, he made Simple as ABC #2: Keep Calm & Validate, a documentary music theatre performance about outsourcing our discomfort with social selection. Programme

dates

Fri June 16 2017 8:30 PM

Sat June 17 2017 8:30 PM

information

  • English

  • Duration of performance unknown (geen pauze)

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Simple as ABC #2: Keep Calm & Validate, is a documentary musical theatre performance about digital migration management and outsourcing our discomfort with social selection. Theatre maker Thomas Bellinck went to Lesbos to prepare the groundwork for the performance.

Simple as ABC #2: Keep Calm & Validate, is a documentary musical theatre performance about digital migration management and outsourcing our discomfort with social selection. Theatre maker Thomas Bellinck went to Lesbos to prepare the groundwork for the performance.

Thomas Bellinck: I visited Mytilene, the capital of Lesbos, in February 2016. The old port exuded a sort of relieved amazement. It was warm and windless, but not a single boat had been spotted for several days. There was wild speculation on the terraces as to why the influx had stopped. I met with an aid worker who apologised profusely for the lack of activity that day. I replied awkwardly that this was positive. 'The aid worker recalled the shipwrecks and cloudbursts of December 2015. Thousands of bodies lined up in front of the registration tent for hours, and sometimes for days. Until they could be screened and digitalised as readable carriers of quantifiable identities.

 

Years ago, when Bellinck was a student in Brussels, he got involved in an illegal immigrants' hunger strike. The hunger strike lasted 60 days and made a lasting impression on me – the smell of mould, empty stomachs, instant coffee and electric burners, the hum of the fluorescent lighting, the headaches, constipation, diabetic comas. It was there, in that poorly lighted, underground garage, that I was first directly confronted with the physicality of social selection – and with how the border is often not a matter of geography but of biology.'

 

The philosopher Grégoire Chamayou describes the contemporary process of relegating migrants to illegality: not because they have committed an offence, but because they are the offence, simply for being on the territory of the nation state.

 

How we like to honour the image of Fortress Europe: an unrealised pipe dream of the old right, and a nightmare already in full swing for the old left. Fortress Europe with its neatly delineated external border and its iconic electrified fencing. But the border has long since ceased to be at the border. The border is everywhere. It is an illegal hunger striker’s anti-bedsore mattress in Brussels. A glass tower in Warsaw next to a bank, which houses the European border and coast guard Frontex's situation room. In a ski village in the Austrian Alps, where the backups of the European databases for fingerprints, the Schengen Area and visas are stored. In weather satellites orbiting the earth, which not only map global warming but also migration flows. Europe is not a fortress. The border is not a wall. The border is a genetic parasite cultivated by humans that mutates, shifts and infects – and sometimes causes death. When its host body survives, it is passed from generation to generation.'

 

This is an excerpt from a text Bellink was commissioned to write for the international art festival NEXT in the Eurometropolis Lille-Kortrijk-Tournai.

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credits

text Thomas Bellinck direction Thomas Bellinck composition Joris Blanckaert dramaturgy Sébastien Hendrickx, Esther Severi costumes An Breugelmans assistent costumes Lila John lighting design Lucas van Haesbroek scenography Jozef Wouters props Laurence Servaes, Marjan De Schutter, Jeroen Van der Ven vocal coach Laurence Servaes corrector English Patrick Lennon translator French Lieve Dierckx, Wim Vermeylen translator Dutch Bert Depuydt, Stijn Maes cast Marjan De Schutter, Jeroen Van der Ven music performed by Celine van der Poel production management Kristien Borgers technical lead Marjan De Schutter technical manager Britt de Jonghe sound Yannick Willox sound design Menno Vandevelde set construction Menno Vandevelde image editing Bert Depuydt and Stijn Maes production Robin vzw & Op.Recht.Mechelen coproduction De Grote Post, Nona, Het Kaaitheater, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Celine van der Poel with the support of De Vlaamse Overheid, VGC and KASK / School of Arts of the HoGent

This performance is made possible by