KVS's artistic director on a 'new era' for multicultural theatre

The KVS (Royal Flemish Theatre) is taking full advantage of Brussels' position as the most cosmopolitan city in Europe - and second most cosmopolitan city in the world - to produce both a wide variety of performances as well as unexpected combinations of genres and cultures.

"We have very strong ambitions, we are working like hell," KVS's new artistic director Michael De Cock tells The Bulletin. "I can feel this really big energy. This is a big ambition of ours to have a gender-diverse, intercultural and intergenerational theatre."

De Cock, an author, director and actor, has a degree in romance languages and literature and trained as an actor at the Conservatoire in Brussels. He has been the artistic director of 't Arsenaal in Mechelen for the past 10 years and he has written extensively on migration as well as children's books.

"I think a theatre can be a place where all communities meet and get to know each other," he says. "More and more we will do English performances. We have a big ambition to go further on this."

What is he bringing to KVS? "We started working with what we call an open ensemble," De Cock says, "artists we have a relationship with, who travel with us along the next few years, but it's open, which means that we don't force them to do things they don't want to.

"We are in a dialogue so they make things here, I propose things to them, but they can also flirt around and do other stuff like make movies, go to other countries, travel, then come back and say: 'This is want I want to do'.

"It's not like having a director saying top down what an ensemble will do. It's lots of people with lots of dreams."

A global city

Another new concept is City Dramaturges. "It is very important for us that the city be the motor for artistic development that will come out of the friction going on between all these languages, all these people meeting each other," he says. "We have three dramaturges: Tunde Adefioye (USA), Kristin Rogghe (Belgium) and Gerardo Salinas (Argentina) working with artists in the city mapping what the city can bring us as material to make performances."

Performances are supertitled in English, French and/or Dutch and there are shows in English such as Macbeth by Zuidpoel, a slam performance by British Egyptian poet Sabrina Mafutse, and recently there was Malcolm X in Arabic, Dutch, French and English.

On Sunday 20 November there is Children's Art Day which, De Cock says, "we are really aiming at every child in Brussels regardless of which language(s) they speak".

What of the future? "Brussels is a very global city, 'glocal' so the local and the global really meet and we should use this as a quality," he says.

"Young artists come to Brussels because of our art scene which is really amazing. We can make it happen that the urban influences find their way to the main stages of European theatre and I think Brussels is the best city in which to do that."

Photo: Danny Willems