Johan Simons & Paul Koek
Two friends join forces once again here: the stage director Johan Simons and the musical director Paul Koek. Both Dutch, they worked together for the first time in the mid-1980s in Rotterdam, in a theatre adventure that made a strong impression: the Theatergroep Hollandia, which later became the ZT Hollandia. Still little known in France where their works were rarely performed, but renowned in all of Northern Europe, Johan Simons and Paul Koek were the instigators of an abrasive way to invest non-theatre spaces, carrying the performance to another field of operation, "in the field", occupying factories, garages, streets, stadiums, houses, in a commando style that places the acting, the text, the direction and the music in direct contact with reality. And the result were "showperformances", caustic and disturbing, often Greek
tragedies compared with the contemporary world of liberalism, exploitation, consumption, families ripped apart. Their company's work focused on a thunderous and joyous representation of the class struggle. Adapted fromVisconti's film The Damned, The Fall of the Gods, their most recent joint opus, which takes a sharp look at Fascism,was presented at the Festival d'Avignon in 2004. In 2005, Johan Simons took over the NTGent, the Ghent theatre, and Paul Koek the De Veenfabriek, a sound laboratory in Leiden. Thus they often work separately, while remaining close. They have gotten together once again to propose another experience of musical theatre, of total theatre, in theCour d'honneur of the Popes' Palace. An adventure in which music plays a uniting role: Kasimir and Karoline by Ödön von Horváth whose action takes place during a great beer festival in Munich. It is moreover in Munich, at the head of the prestigious Kammerspiele, that Johan Simons will continue his work starting in 2010.