Thursday 13th October, 8 pm
Marijs Boulogne & Sara De Bosschere (Belgium)
Endless Medication
Theatre performance
In English*
KUD France Prešeren, Karunova 14
Price: 1500 SIT
*The Slovenian translation of Endless Medication, published in Apokalipsa, will be on sale prior to the performance. Price: 1500 SIT
Organisation: City of Women
In collaboration with: KUD France Prešeren
Marijs Boulogne & Sara De Bosschere
Endless Medication is a theatre event created in 2003 by the Flemish performance artist Marijs Boulogne in collaboration with the Walloon actress Manah Depauw. The premiere starred the two of them; currently, however, Depauw's role is taken by the Flemish actress Sara De Bosschere (De Roovers collective).
Endless Medication tells the story of Rosa, a girl who cannot weep. She is made pregnant by the JesusChristMachine - possibly a reference to Heiner Müller's Hamletmachine - and is soon to give birth - through her intestines - to God's grandson. God appears in the form of a talking bulb and the pregnancy takes on the form of a watermelon growing under Rosa's skirt. Because the child is developing in Rosa's intestines it encumbers her metabolism: the watermelon must be cut/aborted. With God's help Rosa finally gives birth (from her leg) to a little boy who never cries. The story ends with Rosa's incarceration in a madhouse, an infanticide, and a trial in which Rosa is condemned to endless medication.
The performance is realised in the basic inventive style of fairground theatre. Marijs Boulogne treats the tricks of theatre in a childlike, lucid, but also perverse manner. A scatologic potence is hidden behind the apparent innocence of these two energetic, jolly, carefree girls. As a result of its subject - the conception and birth of the grandson of God, as well as the unforced, self-evident way in which they handle obscenity and violence, engenders a form of religiously-tinted pornography.
The name of the girl - Rosa - derives from the Saint Rosa of Lima (1586-1617), and similarly to the experiences of many female mystics from that period, religious ecstasy all too easily turns into highly sexually charged delirium. The sacral and blasphemous go hand in hand. As with Boulogne's later projects, Endless Medication is dominated by a radical, female corporality with particular focus on the interior of the body. Rather than the breasts or the belly she is interested in the cunt and the intestines, shit, menstruation and bodily fluids in general. The disorder that Rosa's pregnancy causes her body finds its antithesis in the chaos, filth and dirt left behind on the stage at the end of the performance. At the same time this work can also be seen within the context of Flemish historical sensibilities re the grotesque, the macabre and the vital.
Marianne Van Kerkhoven
Marijs Boulogne studied directing at the RITS in Brussels and then spent a further year in the section on 'free workshop', new media, installations and interdisciplinary work. She has written and directed Voulez-vous poeper avec môa and Herzschmerz. She has also adapted and directed De Groot en Klein (Botho Strauss) and De presidentes and Anticlimax by Werner Schwab. She created the video performance Visioenen and the installation Fuck me dead (performance, video, slides, embroidery) about devotion and ecstasy, which was shown in June 2002 at the Nieuwpoorttheater in Ghent, the time-festival in 2003 and at STUK.
Sara De Bosschere began her theatre career with the Koninklijk Jeugdtheater children's company in 1986. After graduating from the Dora van der Groen theatre academy in Antwerp, she co-founded the Theater van De Roovers collective in 1994, since which time she has successfully adapted and staged such pieces as Professor Bernhardi, The Wild Duck, Metamorphosen, An evening with the displaced / a displaced evening, Leonce & Lena and Maria Stuart. In 2005 she began working with Marijs Boulogne on the reprise of Endless Medication.
