Mevrouw Bob is part of a series of challenging confrontations between Muziektheater De Kolonie and major theatre personalities. De Kolonie always works with original material, both textual and musical.
Artist in residence, Peter De Graef, once again conjured up a fluent text with the typical De Graef stamp: sharp-witted and biting. Mevrouw Bob is a lady with secrets. She has built a spectacular career on fragments, as a kind of revenge. In a ruthless climb upwards, all means are justified and she delivers a few bold statements that are completely at odds with the #MeToo debate.
Let us be honest, women who build careers by pleasing men and wrapping them around their fingers, it happens too. With a razor-sharp blade, the author dissects the world of high finance, democracy, the media. The stigmatization of the poor suckers. Money is still the best protection against discrimination! As a pharmaceutical lobbyist, Mevrouw Bob, figuratively speaking, gets stinking rich while sleeping. "Do I take a plane… or do I buy one myself?" or "who drives around in the same Rolls Royce for two years?", with such statements she flaunts her powerful status.
Bo Spaenc, the founder of Muziektheater De Kolonie, composed beautiful, at times chilling music, performed live by himself and viola player Marc Tooten. Music that supports and propels Tania Van der Sanden in continuous interaction. In the performance she was coached by Sam Bogaerts, a man with an impressive theatre background, who cannot be accused of creative indecisiveness. Together they refined the character and thus distilled an impressive and intriguing Mevrouw Bob with a distinctive dynamic. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. Artists from different disciplines create in subtle, exuberant or tormented dialogue a rock-solid production.
Tania Van der Sanden <> Mevrouw Bob
The two musicians form a kind of trinity with the performer and took their place on a platform, stage left and stage right, surrounded by fine gauze, a diffuse presence. Between both tubes strides a lady with mysterious glamour, dressed entirely in emerald green: haute couture dress, luxuriant hat (a link to Medusa?), high heels, earrings, rings, necklace, green nail polish. With her full, deep and warm voice, master storyteller Tania Van der Sanden immediately takes the audience along. A voice that can caress like velvet but can just as easily hook on with barbs and tear apart.
The production is full of contradictions: warm, wry, intense, challenging. Without hesitation she displays her entire trajectory. An actress with presence. The stage is her habitat. Her body language recalls an octopus that grabs everything within its reach with its tentacles. What must be consumed thoroughly is the moment. As the only woman in a basket full of powerful men, she learns the ruthless tricks to get ahead. The hunger for more power and wealth clouds vision and undermines judgment… Until she is told she has only a few weeks to live. In a public confession, she makes a clean break with something that has weighed on her for years. The symbols of wealth and prosperity go out, until she stands in her underclothes. Her great love turned out to be one big disillusionment and she took cold-blooded revenge.
The music adds rich depth to all these moods, the dimension that cannot be grasped in language. Sometimes rages through like a hurricane or flutters playfully and mischievously like a butterfly through the space. The entire staging is kept extremely simple, but that is precisely its strength. The text is delicious, the text projection, acting and singing of Tania Van der Sanden is superb, the surrounding music completes the picture. A production that captivates from beginning to end.
- WHAT: Mevrouw Bob
- WHO: Muziektheater De Kolonie and HERMESensemble, text Peter De Graef, performance Tania Van der Sanden, music Bo Spaenck and Marc Tooten
- WHERE & WHEN: October 3 at CC 't Bolwerk Vilvoorde
- PHOTOS: © Jan Marchand, © Pat Verbruggen, Herman Houbrechts