Drama Masters 2025

This academic year, 18 graduating Master's students produced 10 Master's projects in the drama programme. However different they may be, as research-driven theatre practices they still bear the signature of the programme in one way or another. We asked two members of the external jury, Evelyn Coussens and Simon Van Schuylenberg, what trends they discern in this hybrid collection of theatre performances.

Simon Van Schuylenbergh
First of all: text is back! It is striking that, compared to previous graduating generations, text as sign is given a more central role. Although there are exceptions to each of the trends I see, in this case Echo Beach (Arthur Loontjens), a strictly visual performance.

Evelyn Coussens
It fits in with a renewed desire for narrative that we also see in professional theater. I think it’s linked to a search for greater accessibility and legibility. I think that audience awareness, including among many of these graduates, is a positive development (although we need to be careful that it doesn’t go too far). A performance such as Lost & Found and lost again (Robbe Meere) consciously opts for audience-oriented theater with a narrative performance on location.

SVS
The choice of youth theater may also fit in with this desire for accessibility. Two performances explicitly present themselves as children’s or youth theater: Drs. Apparatus (Evert Van Ransbeeck & Felix Braeckman) and ik denk dat het ouder heet (Mira Cole, Seppe Somers & Robbe Embrechts). I Love (And Hate) You, Belgium (Armin Mola) wants to be ‘as democratic as possible’. At the same time, focusing on identification often goes hand in hand with makers who zoom in on themselves. This is perhaps typical of ‘Gen Z’: the revolution against yourself rather than against the world. I wonder if that is necessarily a good idea.

EC
For me, this ‘introversion’ does not prevent makers from explicitly relating to society. In Autumn Rupture (Ella Boomsma & Leila Benchorf), Echo Beach or MODDER SPEAK TO ME (Maryam Sserwamukoko, Titus Smessaert & Tijmen Van Damme), issues such as ecological collapse, feminist struggles or discrimination shine through. It is perhaps characteristic of today’s makers that they view the world from a personal perspective. The very personal I Love (And Hate) You, Belgium points to a universal issue concerning people with a migrant background in a society that constantly questions their right to exist. The makers of ik denk dat het ouder heet transform their own experience of absent fathers into a children's show that seeks to rethink parenthood. There have been generations that were highly politicised and generations with work that was very inward-looking – this generation hovers somewhere in between. The political is ‘metaphorised’ rather than explicitly represented.

SVS
This is truly a generation of performers who have sought to work independently of hierarchy. Performance dramaturgy is considered more important than, for example, production dramaturgy or direction. This is interestingly at odds with the desire for accessibility: rather than being constructed ‘from the audience,’ the performance is built from the performers on stage. Amor Fatigue (Miro Lievens & Nathan Isahakyan) and Autumn Rupture each feature two performers who explore embodiment and imagination through highly personal performance impulses.

EC
This also brings us to the importance attached to collaboration.

SVS
Whereas collaboration among a previous generation of theatre makers was driven by internal tension and conflict as a drive for performance, tension among this group more readily leads to ‘safer’ choices. Who we are today, our differences and privileges, are fuel for heated debates. Bringing those differences to the stage requires mature, well-considered choices. You don’t do make those at the end of the process, but embrace it from the start. These students seem to want to do that, which is very positive, but it can mean you miss out on making sharper artistic choices.

EC
I find it almost more interesting to look at how young people work today than what they bring to the stage. This also contains an invitation to the professional field. During the jury discussions, you can sense how much they struggle with this collaboration. Certainly at the end of the process, there is a need for someone to make decisions – a return to ‘authority’. Fortunately, this does not take the form of an authoritarian director. For me, the solution lies in the figure of the dramaturg as a process supervisor. Rather than having someone who has to fix a number of things at the end of the horizontal process, a good dramaturg is someone who guides the tension you talk about, Simon, and makes it work.

SVS
It is striking that My Nemesis (Manizja Kouhestani) is a performance that was created entirely without a dramaturg or director, yet it is the most coherent and dramaturgically strong. This is probably because it is driven by a dialogue between two fictional feminist performance artists on stage – this form automatically creates a tension.

EC
How do these students relate to the work of other makers?

SVS
I saw many ‘children of’, sometimes quite literally, in the case of Housewarming, where Kes Bakker and Anna De Graeve explicitly mention how the work of their theatre-making parents has influenced them.

It is notable that the interaction with the visual arts, both in terms of form and in the way makers place their theatre work in a broader art-historical context, is less prominent. In ‘my day’, we were less concerned with the medium of theatre or theatre plays alone. The aim then was really to create an autonomous language – a very distinct artistic language that could not be compared to others. This was, of course, in keeping with the offshoots of post-dramatic theatre, in which aesthetics were paramount. That seems less relevant now. Echo Beach and My Nemesis are, in my opinion, the exceptions to this.

EC
In terms of form, this generation once again offers a particularly beautiful palette of different ways of performing, from well-made plays to textless theatre, from monologues to location theatre, from mime to stand-up comedy. I really sense a search in this generation for the best form to capture their content.