Ivo van Hove

Eugène Ionesco in one of his essays states that the aim of avant-garde plays – and of avant-garde artists I add – is “to rediscover and make known a forgotten truth – and to reintegrate it, in an untopical way, into what is topical…”.  For Ivo van Hove every play is a contemporary play, even Shakespeare or Miller. His process of choosing which play he will “update” is a time consuming process that demands a deep reading and understanding of the world of each play that will lead to an interpretation relevant to the now . So for example when he did Angels in America (Amsterdam, 2008), he staged the play bare, ignoring in a sense Kushner’s stage directions, stripping it of all the spectacle and replacing it with an audible sensory experience filled with David Bowie’s songs. He ended up cutting almost two hours of material and changing radically the ending. Roy’s body remained on stage from the moment of his death until the end, where giant projected waves crushed on the rear wall of the theatre while Prior was rejecting Louis and both of them were walking off of the stage, and that was a way to show that they along with the audience, were returning to life. I would say the van Hove operates as a director/dramaturg. His works are in a casual relationship to the texts, and should be considered as independent events which cannot be rationalized by the playwrights’ intentions.  

Avant-garde theatre treats the performance space as a space shared with the audience, and even though many directors of van Hove’s generation are seeking alternative, non-theatrical spaces, he remains to more traditional architectural structures but he “refuses illusionism”. Hans-Thies Lehmann in his Postdramatic Theatre differentiates space based upon the effect of its dynamics and he mentions the centripetal dynamic which is created when the distance between performers and audience is reduced to such a degree that “theatre becomes a space of shared energies instead of transmitted signs.". Ivo van Hove creates the centripetal dynamic in different ways. For example, in the A View from the Bridge (London, 2015) he placed the audience on stage, on both sides of the performing space, creating a profound proximity to the audience where breath, sweat, movement, voice, gaze gave a multisensorial experience to the spectators. With the Roman Tragedies (London, 2009), a six-hour adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Anthony and Cleopatra, he invited the audience to move freely between stage and auditorium in the Barbican theatre. In this part live event - part multimedia presentation the spectators could perch on the couches, sit on the floor, or visit the bar that had been set up towards the back. This had the startling effect of transforming the audience into the Roman populace, whose moods and whims the actors were manipulating.

The technological advancements in equipment and software along with avant-garde’s intense usage of media and unusual non-theatrical conventions has created a precedent of numerous applications where, often, it feels that even the sky is not the limit. Ivo van Hove could not be an exception, of course. And he is taking full advantage of the means provided by the developed times he is living in and applies them in a case by case manner. So, for example in O’Neil’s A View from a Bridge he presented Eddie’s death with a blood rain pouring from the ceiling soaking the actors and flooding the stage. In Kings of War (Amsterdam, 2015), an epic production in which five of Shakespeare’s English histories - Henry V, Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3, and Richard III - are condensed into one four-and-a-half-hour-long drama, much of the action of the play was captured by a roving cameraman and projected onto a screen above the bunker.

From the three above aspects of van Hove’s practice one could say that he is an iconoclast. He denies the characterization, and rightly so because the key element that distinguishes his productions is his actor’s directing which is interrelated to the universes he creates each time, shaped by his interpretation and dramaturgy. For example, in Lillian Hellman’s Little Foxes (New York, 2010) he allowed “a dedicated ensemble to tackle, pummel and jump into roles with a dignity-spurning intensity.”. Ivo van Hove has a specific way of working with actors. He demands his cast to be off book from day one of the rehearsal process turning this way the text into a tool in the back pocket of the actor ready to come out when needed. He pushes his actors to the limits, in Scenes from a Marriage (New York, 2014), an adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s TV miniseries, the couples would engage in fifteen-minute fights, where his direction to the actors where “kill him” and “kill her”, creating a dangerous unchoreographed choreography. The thing that makes the difference in his work with actors, which is determinative of the pushing he does to them is that he prefers to work with permanent ensembles where trust exists through practice and time. He calls it a family and his Amsterdam family is composed by twenty-two members, and he has managed to create a smaller one in New York, for example Elizabeth Marvel has starred in Little Foxes, A Streetcar Named Desire (New York, 1999) and Hedda Gabler (New York, 2004).

Ivo van Hove has been criticized that, on some cases, the liberties he took made the text unrecognisable and occasionally his multimedia applications are obfuscating instead of illuminating. Robert Brustein examines van Hove’s take on Moliere’s The Misanthrope (New York, 2007) as an example of how a director manages to bury the issues of the play “under technological distractions, screeching dustups, frenzied behavior, and hysterical shit-fits.”.

Two prominent directors of the same avant-garde generation as van Hove are Romeo Castellucci and Bob Wilson. Both of them are creating in a conceptual manner, revisiting older texts or devising new ones with grand philosophical topical themes and applying excessive usage of technology, producing impeccable images. But they both fall under what Richard Schechner describes as niche-garde. He defines niche-garde as the creation of new work that is brilliantly accomplished but not in advance of anything. And he continues his argument by stating that these artists operate within the rules of the global market and have turned themselves and their work into a brand. I would add, especially in regards to the two paradigms I am bringing, that their work has become recognizable in way where for example when you see a Bob Wilson show you know it is a Bob Wilson show. They have excelled in technique and created a distinct aesthetic that apply to all their work.