The politics of scenography. Disrupting the stage

Abstract

In 2009 Flemish theatre maker Thomas Bellinck got involved in the protest of a group of paperless immigrants in Brussels. What started as an unnoticed hunger strike in an underground parking, with the help of Bellinck transformed in a public protest on a historical meaningful square in the city centre: nine hunger, with no legal status, conducted by Bellinck sang the ‘Brabançonne’, the Belgian national hymn. Not much later, and to almost everybody’s surprise, the protest action was selected for the 2009 edition of the Flemish Theatre Festival. Instead of putting the protest on stage, re-enacting it, at the opening’s night of the festival Bellinck delivered a text in Brussels’ Kaaitheater, somewhere between a political speech and a theatrical monologue raising pressing questions about the relation between art and activism. The underground parking, the main square and the theatre stage function as three different environments that together make up the scenography of this political performance in three ‘scenes’. This article investigates how these different environments – the private parking as private place, the square as public space and the theatre as art space - determined the actions that took place within them, more particularly how these environments functioned each in their own way as political stages, how they invited or obstructed certain behaviour and how they interacted with each other. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s idea of politics as a rupture of the ‘normal’ distribution of positions. (2010: 30) the article analyzes the political dramaturgy of this performance from the perspective of its scenography, more particularly its constantly shifting environments. Scenography from this perspective can be understood as a practice that determines, organizes and refigures who and what is there to be seen and to be heard.