Geert Belpaeme
Navigating beyond certainty

Playing is serious business: that is the starting point of ‘De speelse mens’, an essay by researcher and drama teacher Geert Belpaeme. True to that premise, his essay examines playing in depth, with references to an impressive series of thinkers and to his own playing and teaching practice: clear and incisive but, indeed, also playful and searching. The implications of that seemingly simple premise prove far-reaching, not only for (aspiring) actors, but for all of us. A conversation with Geert, about play and uncertainty, about what a chair is (not) and how we can become less human, but also about the drama programma at KASK & Conservatorium and the research cluster Negotiating Realities that Geert coordinates.

ONRUST 
Playing is not a laughing matter, Geert? 

Indeed it is not, although it is often associated with something frivolous and with leisure. Even the historian Johan Huizinga — someone whose work you cannot ignore if you want to discuss the role of play in culture — sees it as something that takes place apart from normal life, in a separate time and space. Certainly, play does have a certain frivolity, as a strength even, but yes, it is at the same time something very serious. 

It was nice to read in Huizinga something I also noticed intuitively in my playing practice and in my classes, namely that if you don't take playing seriously, nothing at all will happen. Someone who plays is serious: seriousness and playfulness do not contradict each other at all, they need each other. Being completely serious about what you are doing and being fully absorbed in it is necessary in order for anything to happen. 

ONRUST 
Your essay stems from a research project from a while back. But that research was not just conducted at the writing table, was it? 

The ‘Towards a New Materialism’ project grew out of something I’d noticed in my classes with first-year drama students, in their very first semester here. We work with physical improvisation: without text, without a concept, character or idea being set in advance, we improvise. There is nothing, just the space and their presence, and with that we set to work. This is how I want to get them to play in a very fundamental way, to lay a foundation on which they can then build. From the very beginning it becomes clear there that playing does not mean imitating something, pretending. No, there is something very fundamental in being there, as yourself, present on stage, and that makes up the core of playing. 

In those classes, I began to notice certain structures of how meaning is created. I wanted to explore that further: how meaning arises through physical interaction, and what meaning actually is. We organized a symposium where we shared experiences with colleagues from many European schools, and ultimately the project ensured that my teaching practice became much more focused, that I understood better and more deeply what I was actually doing there. And the desire to write about that also arose. During classes I can share enough with the students — we start the exercises with as little explanation as possible, but afterwards we always reflect on what we have seen, what has happened — but because playing as it happens there is so fundamentally linked to a form of playing that concerns us all, I wanted to share things about it with people outside the programme and the theatre. I wanted to write from the perspective of the performing arts to reflect on a form of play that we all practice constantly, but of which we are often no longer aware. 

The research took place within my classes, and within my reading and thinking, but also in the making and playing practice I had with Mats Van Herreweghe at the time. One of the performances we made together, in which we wanted to explore those principles of meaning-making more deeply, is Sprachspiel; named after a term by Ludwig Wittgenstein. He was a major inspiration for setting up the project; in his Philosophical Investigations — so deep, lucid but also playful and open — he invents all kinds of ‘language games’ to explore how meaning is created, what it actually is and how we engage in that creation through our actions. In the performance, we sit opposite each other at a small table and have a conversation with hand movements. It starts very simply with hand movements that have no meaning at all, abstract movements, but we make them for each other and towards each other, and we react to what we do, and more and more, communication arises. All kinds of relationships develop, we learn to understand each other, build things. All of that without there being any ‘content’ beyond the playing itself; there is no meaning except that which arises in the form, in the moment itself, in the understanding and communication itself. We do this for about an hour, until we believe we have created something in which we come to a deep understanding of each other and to connection, without a word having been uttered that has to do with anything but the here and now.  

ONRUST
In the essay, you frequently refer to your classes, which works very evocatively. Of course, KASK & Conservatorium has a drama programme of which we can be proud, but is this kind of focus characteristic of the programme? You also dedicate the book to Sam Bogaerts ... 

In a way, that approach is indeed characteristic, I think, although there are obviously colleagues who touch on very different things. My essay is indeed dedicated to Sam Bogaerts ... I myself was taught by Sam and after I graduated I was also invited by him to develop this series of classes to complement what he was doing, almost as a response. So my essay indeed resonates with the conception of playing that is at the core of our drama programme, and with how teachers teach there. And let’s be clear about this: this is not a question of style; nowhere in this book, either, I talk about ‘playing is done like this’, about right and wrong ways of playing. Part of the philosophy from which we start is precisely that it is not about learning to play stylistically and technically ‘correct’, but that there is something very fundamental and personal that you can tap into if you want to play in theatre. That playing is not about pretending, but that it has to do with the core of who you are, with your presence there on stage and with daring to let people look at you as a human being. In the essay I talk about the ‘imbalance’, daring to be out of balance, daring to let go of stability, daring to let yourself be touched, and this is also very much at the heart of Jan Steen's practice, for example. 

ONRUST
Daring to let yourself be unbalanced ... reading about that in your essay feels almost liberating, and indeed it is often with freedom that play is associated, but in your text ‘uncertainty’ seems a more crucial term, is that right? 

Play is indeed very often associated with freedom; in a sense I can understand that, but of course the term is always problematic ... What is freedom? Free from what, at the expense of what? What structures enable certain freedoms? For me, then, play has nothing to do with ‘unlimited freedom’. Uncertainty seemed to me a much more manageable term. One of the main lines in the essay starts with the idea that play is set apart from our ‘real’ actions and lives: here and now we are in real life and doing real things, and when I play in the theatre or when children play, that is not real. A strange division, because playing is definitely not unreal, but it does question what ‘real’ means; how that ‘realness’ is constructed. I translate that in terms of certainty and uncertainty; in everyday life, we act from a certainty; that this is a chair and that it serves to sit on ... But that certainty is in fact a containment, a normative reduction of a very complex object with a lot of possibilities and a complex history — how it came into being, how it got here, looking exactly as it does — and everything we do with it, even how we sit on it, is also complex, if only in a physiological sense. We have to forget all of that complexity in order to do something very simple: sit on that ‘chair’ to have a coffee. This containment of the complexity that comprises existence is necessary for our everyday reality to be sustained, and play consists precisely in daring to tear open that certainty, to question it. This is something that happens naturally on a stage. We see it every time I ask someone in my classes to go on stage and do nothing but just be there and let themselves be looked at: everything that is self-evident, even just standing there, loses its self-evidence. That simplest certainty of ‘I am here’ becomes uncertain: all kinds of impulses you feel, things you become aware of, how you stand and what that entails physically, how you relate to the others ... I find the disintegration of that unity very fascinating and I see it as essential in playing.  

ONRUST
In the essay you make much of the analogy between the playing of children and the playing of actors, and someone might object that apart from the coincidence of a shared term, they have little else to do with each other, but that uncertainty, that openness, does convincingly connect the two. 

I think they are very fundamentally connected, yes. How I want my students to come to play on stage is not by starting to play this or that character, but through a kind of play in which all of our existence originates and which we see in very small children ... The certainty we create to hold on to is but a containment of the uncertainty and the ‘unground’ that shapes our existence. It is assumed that we play as children and stop doing so at some point, but we don't. We never stop playing, but our playing just becomes very complex and often very serious and standardised, and that is our social being. We sit and talk and that is serious: I talk ‘for real’ and you have to take what I say seriously ... but that is a code, an agreement. 

ONRUST
You do something very interesting with different meanings of the term ‘acting’ as well, when, in a fascinating move, you end up reconnecting play with responsibility. But doesn't that complicate play again, inhibit its openness?  

When that certainty, that self-evidence is shattered in playing, a kind of multiplicity emerges, and the actor's practice consists of learning to navigate this. In this complexity and multilayeredness, beyond certainty, I can shape my presence, and how I do this will make a certain meaning emerge. The playing field for this is so much wider than we usually think, and therein lies an opportunity and indeed a responsibility. In classes, it happens that students make a movement, and I, they, everyone there sees and feels that nothing at all happens. What makes the difference, what makes that something happens or not? I think: you do have to propose something, even if it is a movement that does not yet mean something concrete, you have to do it ‘for real’, so that it can start being something real. That's where a player's responsibility lies and this, again, relates to our whole existence.  

Playing may have to do with a certain freedom, with breaking open normativity, but it does not stop there; above all, it is also about the next step. As soon as you break something open, the possibility lies before you to propose an action, to give direction to the moment and the situation. On stage, but also off it: to your existence, to a society, to the world, the future ... That may sound very lofty, but to me there is a very simple but fundamental seed in a student who learns, through an exercise like that, that a simple gesture can be made in such a way that everyone thinks, ‘so what?’, but that the same gesture can also be taken seriously — in its simplicity and perhaps foolishness, but from the conviction: this is what I am proposing, this is what I am bringing into the world now, connecting it with everything that is already there and from there I am going to build. From there I can build anything I want, and I can take on a responsibility to further shape and give direction to this situation.  

That is playing, and therein indeed lies the play with the word ‘acting’: in its meaning of playing a role, a fiction, but also in the original meaning of agere: to perform an action, and that means in its most fundamental sense: to set something in motion, to give direction. We don't always do that, especially when we perform all kinds of routine actions that simply maintain our shared reality, but beyond that you might be able to set something in motion, bring something out of balance so that it can take a different direction. When we do that, even to a very small extent, we are shaping our world, our existence.

ONRUST
In that context, you describe play as, among other things, ‘a constant renegotiation of existing relations’, and that of course recalls the name of the research cluster you recently became the coordinator of: Negotiating Realities. Do the considerations from your essay play a role there, can this research find a follow-up there?  

In helping to think about the cluster as a whole and the research line concerning ‘playfulness and performativity’ in particular, the work I did for this essay certainly helped me. Playfulness is an interesting and workable concept, from which we can think about different disciplines, art and reality, the social and political ... Not, again, in the sense that we want to approach things in a ‘fun’ and frivolous way, but rather that we want to consider issues from the fundamental uncertainty on which everything is founded and dare to stand in that uncertainty. There is no way other than that of uncertainty, and it can be frightening, but playfulness teaches us precisely to deal with complexity, not to shy away from it ... and that is quite daunting, but there is a great need for that in our world. In many prevailing discourses, however, there is no room for complexity, except as something we are supposed to solve. 

The research line on ‘playfulness and performativity’ focuses on practices that see reality as performative, and this is linked of course to the cluster's central idea that there is no uniform, unambiguous reality but that there are indeed realities that are created, serve certain purposes, can be maintained and questioned. We want to develop and bring to light practices that question the unambiguous, certain idea of reality and put forward alternatives to it, propose other realities ... With the researchers who are there already and with those who will join us soon, we will of course shape everything further, but it is already clear to us what drives us and from which principles we reflect, even if we meet there with very different practices and backgrounds.  

ONRUST
Huizinga, to return to him once more, distinguished societies that are more and less ‘playful’; you do not explicitly judge the degree of playfulness of our society in your essay, but your assessment does shine through, no? 

We lack that playfulness very much, yes. Many places and many people do display it — and it is essentially present in everyone — but as a society we can become much more playful. I think it is very important to stress that playfulness is not a moral issue, it has nothing to do with right and wrong, but that it is a positive trait. A society that is more playful can handle more complexity, is more open and therefore can handle greater diversity, is more inclusive in the face of so many more different forms of being, of shifting identities. As such, it also gives more agency to more people and organisms, which would allow us to become less human: to break free from certain constructions of being human that have been very destructive. I think we need to learn to become less human, and letting go of unambiguous, normative constructs and learning to be present, act and take responsibility within chaos, ambiguity and indeterminacy seems to me to be a step in the right direction to that end, however challenging that may be.