Wewilllivestorm

Benjamin Verdonck trained as an actor at the Royal Flemish Conservatory of Antwerp where he was the laureate in 1995. He worked with Ivo van Hove, Johan Simons and Paul Koek while creating a musical theatre group with Valentine Kempynck who subsequently was his associate in all his shows. Since 2000, he has staged works in different theatre installations in the public space, such as Hirondelle / Dooi Vogeltje / The Great Swallow, seven days during which he remained perched in a nest 32 m high, installed on the façade of the administration centre of the city of Brussels calling out to passers-by; in I Like America and America Likes Me, he held discussions with a pig for three days, to evoke a certain disarray regarding the tensions between Iraq and the United States. Benjamin Verdonck is currently artist in residence at the CAMPO in Ghent, at the Toneelhuis in Antwerp and at the KVS in Brussels, and has notably worked with the director Arne Sierens and the Het Muziek Lod ensemble. Always very much involved in the concerns of his time, Benjamin Verdonck creates a highly political theatre that never tries to indoctrinate but simply to question, to make people think, with the weapons of poetry, humour and stagecraft.
At the Festival d'Avignon, Benjamin Verdonck presented, with Fumiyo Ikeda and Alain Platel, Nine Finger in 2007.

What is happening on the stage of Wewilllivestorm, a personal work that Benjamin Verdonck created with his father and the musician Tomas Desmet? A silent journey in the actor's universe? A dramatic poem recounted by animated objects? A meeting between father and son? A fantasy world in which any pretension would be chased away to leave room for simplicity leading directly to beauty? A child's view on a universe too large for him? A questioning on time that passes and death that approaches? Undoubtedly all of these and a great many other things besides. Accumulating objects from daily life – bread, shoes, tables, etc. –, handling them, playing with them as if they were equals, making them come alive before us just for the pleasure of sharing, with tenderness and humour, the stage with these objects themselves, Benjamin Verdonck places us in the heart of a mystery and makes us, in our turn, curious, intrigued, disturbed, captivated, moved… The precision with which each object is staged by the actor is only equalled by the beauty of this world cobbled together between night and day, between laughter and emotion. He does not tell one story but 10, 20, 100 stories that we interpret according to our fantasies and experiences. Benjamin Verdonck shifts, in a playful and deeply thought-out manner, our view on the world around us. Making these ordinary objects the heroes of his adventure, he forces us to perceive them differently and to question, for a few moments, the unfolding of increasingly sophisticated images, sounds and objects that await us outside the performance, outside the theatre. Curious, demanding, Benjamin Verdonck returns to Avignon to, without seeming to, question us on our rampant consumption, our thirst for useless sophistication. Politically incorrect? Yes, but with the lightness and freedom of a poet of the stage who imposes nothing but shares everything.

de: Benjamin Verdonck et Valentine Kempynck
avec: Benjamin Verdonck, Tomas Desmet, Herman Verdonck
production exécutive: Toneelhuis

production: Nieuwpoorttheater / CAMPO (Gand)
avec le soutien: des autorités flamandes et de la Ville d'Anvers