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Lies Holtrop spoke to Walter Verdin in the RO-Theater on the evening before the premier of Dylan Thomas' Under Milkwood. After the great successes of the previous years in this theatre (including Angels in America), the director Guy Cassiers once again asked him to make the video decor for the performance. His experiences working for theatre are wide ranging, as can be seen.
Walter Verdin: "I don't know if I like it. I wasn't going to do it any more, and yet I have. Because it's magic. Added to which, I love working in the RO-Theater. They have the means of putting on a beautiful performance, I can use whatever equipment I like here. It is a good environment with nice people. I prefer to work here, rather than in Belgian theatres. That is the kind of thing you ultimately can do if you are always busy and keep showing what you make. That's how I ended up here."
Lies Holtrop: For eight years you reaped great success with the video work that you made with and about dance and theatre. There was little time left for your own projects. What brought you to follow the course you did and has that time working with modern dance had an influence on, for example, the way in which you designed X<Afrika?
WV: "It will certainly have had an influence, but that period also sticks in my memory as a very frustrating time. I stopped with Videorhythmics in 1984 because it had become far too expensive: you not only had to rent the equipment for each concert, but you also had to pay the musicians. In the next five years after that, I made various installations until I started working for dance in 1989. In '93 I made Videolepsia, a really very big installation built up of various parts. That was an awful lot of work and I made practically nothing out of it. That was more or less the turning point. I thought: I want to do concerts again, be on stage again. At least I'll have an audience and then people will at least know how you have to look at things. In retrospect, of course, it wasn't as easy as that."
LH: Can you consider X<Afrika to be a sequel to Videorhythmics?
WV: "To me there is actually no difference between the two. They were just made using different factors. In Videorhythmics, video itself was the basis, in X<Afrika it's the African rhythms, African culture. Videorhythmics was less pictorial, everything was linear; it was a concerto with video as the orchestra and musicians as the soloists. X<Afrika is more like a double concerto for sound and image. Africa is the orchestra. I use all sorts of different ways of approaching video and music and also, all kinds of different ways of linking the two via a computer, or not, as the case may be."
LH: What does the X in the title mean?
WV: "It was called something else at first: TAM*TAM Stories. TAM was an abbreviation for Television Audience Measurement, a private joke. But since 'tamtam' is used everywhere at present, I chose another title. That was 'Ex Africa semper aliquid novi' (Something new is always coming from Africa), one of Aristotle's statements. Later, I made 'Ex' into 'X', but to be pronounced in the English way. 'X' also means a cross, as in X-ing."
LH: How did you get the idea for X<Afrika?
"I heard that my friend Frank Michiels had gone to West Africa for his ethno musicological research into Malinke rhythms. He was also involved in Videorhythmics at that time. I then suggested to him that I would tag along and put everything on video and then make something in the style of Videorhythmics afterwards. We then sat and thought together about how we could best approach this, and if we should put African percussionists into the concert. Frank had already notated the Malinke rhythms using a drummer here in Europe, and then we filmed those rhythms there. The Jembé drummers from the Malinke tribe are already well known in the West. Their music usually consists of a basic rhythm played on three different drums, each fitted with a bell. That's six tones altogether. The Jembéfola then improvise on this. We chanced across a percussion group on the Ivory Coast, Kian-Zo. They are now on stage in X<Afrika. To make it a bit more complicated, they were also from another tribe the Bété. They played very differently, much louder and with more complicated rhythms. Frank couldn't understand a thing at first. Kian-Zo bring rhythms into X<Afrika that are quite different from just Malinke. We were in the Ivory Coast for five weeks. Through Frank's contacts in Belgium, we came across all kinds of people in the Ivory Coast, sometimes in villages where you would otherwise never get to. But I was glad to be back, I was very disillusioned. It is a culture they have destroyed and are still destroying. It will be gone entirely within 50 years. The whole system is so unlikely, but you can't change it. Ah well. X<Afrika is not about all that. And I don't want to have anything to do with all sorts of ethnic labels that can be stuck on me because of this video concert. Next thing you know, they'll be asking me for all kinds of multicultural panels and the like. I don't dare think about that."
LH: In the video rhythms for X<Afrika, I can see and hear a lot of fragments from daily life in particular, and a lot fewer drums and musicians than I had expected. When you got back, how did you set about processing all that material?
WV: "Frank had put all the rhythms that we had heard there into a music computer for me, With sampled drums and bells, and I worked from there. I matched synthesizer sounds as well as sound and image samples to his samples. I translated for example, the sound of a heavy drum in a particular image with the appropriate synchronous sound. As I just said, the basic rhythm in Jembé is formed by three different drums with a bell. In this way I created an image/sound combination for each bell and each drum, and I started editing using them. And so, as I was editing, I was also making music. The rhythms in the video rhythms are African, but not the instruments because they were formed by the sounds and images that I recorded there. And there's a lot of every day life in that."
LH: That's how you got your 'orchestra'. Is the rest of the concert, the soloists' music for example, entirely improvised, or is everything set out ahead of time?
WV: "At the start, I turn on a tape with the video rhythms; that stops at the end of the concert. That more or less sets the time frame. There are solos and improvisations but there are definite agreements and we have created numbers. Frank and I set to work with Kian-Zo and the singers on the basis of the video rhythms. I set something up and they improvised on it, and so gradually, the numbers evolved from that. Frank was a kind of contact person or the 'leader of the orchestra' among the percussionists, it was more difficult for me to communicate with them. They are used to an entirely different way of working, and sometimes, for example, they hear quite different accents than we do. They were not used to counting, things like: he starts and then you join in on the eighth beat. That was very difficult in rehearsals at first. It's an interaction, some things are based on their music and their customs, and sometimes they have to adjust to our ways. When you look at the enormous differences, it is truly amazing how easily it all went in the end. Since the percussionists usually work together like that, Frank gives an agreed signal now and then. There are signals in the video rhythms too, a couple of terribly ugly synthesizer sounds. I put them in specially because they are ugly, but also because they are the most audible for the musicians. I like thin, ugly sounds like that. For example, to indicate the end of a concert, I sometimes work with a sinus, that is the simplest sound wave, a beep tone. I find that very beautiful."
LH: Do you try to let your audience, as it were, travel through 'your' Africa in X<Afrika?
WV: "I do want to create an atmosphere, but I definitely don't have a message or anything like that. I don't want to force my idea of Africa on people. X<Afrika should be experienced as a kind of immersion in sensory experiences. Someone told me that when the lights went up at the end of a performance, they were briefly disorientated and surprised that to find themselves in a European city. I find that very pleasing, that piece worked then. They probably experienced something different from what I experienced from it, but that doesn't matter. I succeeded in transporting someone."
LH: I don't think you want to be bothered with all kinds of semiotic analyses and layers of meaning.
WV: "No, because I don't work like that. I studied it all; for a time, I did art history, so you know. That's why I started working with music, and, for a time, I did etches and paintings; if you just do things, then it doesn't work like that - all that semiotics. I don't want to put content into my images, I have no message to pass on. I do however like empty images, where the meaning has been removed, just leaving the sensory. And yet, I always work with images that appeal to me. So I can't really say that I work with images without any content at all. That's what I chose."
LH: Based on that I find it quite logical that you work with music. I think that music has a much greater sensory and emotional effect on people than images.
WV: "Could be. Smells even more."
LH: Would you like that? To work with smells as well?
WV: "No. I am too impressionable myself for that. I could start hyperventilating just by smelling a certain smell, for example. It happened the day before yesterday on the train. I suddenly became very nervous, I thought: 'good heavens, there is someone behind me wearing a perfume that reminds me of something,' and so on. No, working with smells is far too dangerous. And it is very personal as well. Smells have very different effects on different people."
LH: Just to go back to X<Afrika: have you given any other performances than the one in Brussels in '96?
WV: "Just one, in Copenhagen, but that was without Kian-Zo."
LH: That must have been very bare, without percussionists.
WV: "I thought it was very good, in particular because we found we could do it without them. But it was very different, and I much prefer it with them. We are going to perform X<Afrika on the steps of the Schone Kunst Museum in Antwerp in August '97, and Kian-Zo will definitely be taking part. I want to completely rework the entire concert for the performance at the World Wide Video Festival. I had already done that before the Copenhagen version, but we had three singers there and now I want to do it with only two. Because of the workability and because the voices and the songs are too important at present. We actually have too many conventional songs and then it becomes too much like an ordinary pop concert with various songs. It should be much more like a party. The audience doesn't sit either, there are only standing places."
LH: Does the audience react like that as well, like being at a party?
WV: "We haven't been able to do it yet under the right circumstances. At the Arts Festival in Brussels it was a theatre audience, and they came with quite a different attitude. And I had to go to quite some lengths to get a bar put in the auditorium and to get the seats out. People were more or less moving, though."
LH: The Melkweg is quite a different auditorium than the one in Brussels, smaller too. What are you going to change in the whole set up?
WV: "In Brussels we had two stages 8 x 6 metres, facing each other, With a catwalk of 12 metres in between. The video rhythms were projected onto the rear walls of each stage and onto the ceiling. But that is much too complicated and that's why we made the Copenhagen version with one stage and a small catwalk in front of it and one projection onto the back wall. Very simple, very rock 'n' roll, rudimentary. In the Melkweg I certainly want to make two projections, but I always think it's really clever with a third on the ceiling, so you can completely immerse yourself in it. The performance in Amsterdam will be better than the one in Brussels. A lot went wrong with the computer and other things there, but that more or less can't happen any more. It has been a difficult genesis, and that still has an effect on some things. Of course, we have rehearsed together, but I would have liked much more interaction on stage between the percussionists and the singers. There are too many numbers where the percussion is just accompaniment for the song. That comes from the fact that when we were making X<Afrika, I divided it into two parts: the songs and the improvisations of percussion on the video rhythms. I find the second part the more beautiful, it's much more part of me. But I am going to rework all the songs now to give them more rhythm. So a lot will change, in the interaction between the people on stage as well. I want to keep both aspects in, the improvisations and the songs, but it's very difficult to sell them both to the same audience. I think that that's my own schizophrenia coming out. The important thing is that X<Afrika continues to be a party and it's very difficult to find the balance between ‘rock’ and ‘dance. ‘Rock’ is more of a white, European way of focused looking and listening, where ‘dance’ is the black, African way of being totally immersed in music and images. I don't know what it will turn out like yet, but I do know that it will be even better."
– Lies Holtrop
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