Theresa Smith
Liezl de Kock is on a surreal high at the moment, having just returned from Amsterdam where she performed in the award-winning Crazy in Love.
Scooping up Best International Performance at the Amsterdam Fringe Festival, Crazy in Love was deemed a “must see” show in the Dutch city, after having won a Standard Bank Ovation Award at the National Arts Festival in 2013.
Presented by A Conspiracy of Clowns and the National Arts Festival, Crazy in Love is devised and performed by de Kock and theatre legend Andrew Buckland, with direction by Rob Murray and design by Jayne Batzofin.
“It was very unexpected and quite surreal. In the photograph ... my mom said I look like someone who escaped from a prison,” she laughed via Skype about winning in Amsterdam.
“It was lovely... that recognition. Especially performing to people that aren’t South African. We didn’t know whether our humour would be their cup of tea or whether they’d buy into the story.”
“Amsterdam (Fringe Festival) feels extremely experimental and they love avant guarde work. It’s wacky and weird and random.
“We were the most normal ones there because we have a story with a beginning, middle and end. There are characters. The plot makes sense. It has dialogue.”
The tragi-comedy about a father and daughter who are looking for their lost wife and mother is inspired by an event in Until I Find You, a novel by John Irving.
As co-artistic director of A Conspiracy of Clowns, de Kock has performed in all their works to date – Pictures of You, Kardiavale, Benchmarks, and now Crazy in Love, as well as all the deaf and hearing integrated works of FTH:K.
She was nominated for a Fleur du Cap Best Actress Award for her role as the mother in Murray’s Womb Tide and she picked up a Standard Bank Silver Ovation Award this year for her MA final exam piece, Piet se Optelgoed.
She will return to Amsterdam Fringe Festival with the physical theatre piece in 2015, but first Capetonians will see both at the Cape Town Fringe Festival.
She is finishing off the written part of her thesis right now, but the performance of Piet se Optelgoed is ready to go.
Like any practical work by an MA student, Piet se Optelgoed went through a lot of work, rewrites, comments by Rhodes University advisors and more work. It started off as a Piet se Kinders (which should have had four performers) and morphed into a two-hander (Lexi Meyer manipulates the cadaverous puppet) which looks at the power and powerlessness of women.
Now it is about the relationship the Piet character (played by De Kock) has with a cadaver-like puppet which washes up om the shore.
“It’s not beautiful puppety at all. That kind of work draws me alot more than text,” said de Kock.
She specifically wanted to work “in the female grotesque and the abject”. (Here the abject would refer to that which disturbs social reason).
“It’s about how you can evoke images of the female grotesque and the abject through solo performance, by using materials like paper and plastic, to create a body mask through bouffon,” she said.
Bouffon is a modern French theatre term (coined by Jacques Lecoq at his L'École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris) used to describe a style of performance that focuses on the art of mockery.
She uses a full body mask, padding herself, exaggerating her body: “It gives you a licence to not be polite and piss off an audience,” she explained.
Gleefully deranged, fringe dweller Piet is a horror story told to children when they don’t behave, the character who lures away bad children to her crazy kitchen.
At its most basic though, Piet se Optelgoed is a vehicle for de Kock to experiment with different performance styles and to stretch herself: “To do something that really scares me. Solo work scares me. Being a women who doesn’t care what the audiences thinks, that scares me.
“There’s themes of barrenness and children, and family and the nucleus. I don’t know whether it’s because I’m in my 30s now. I try to find a space to explore these things, and look at the idea of being a fringe dweller on the periphery of life.
“I wonder ... I suppose yes. Me. I’ve always felt like I am on the periphery, the fringe, connecting with people who like working there, those who share this crazy imagination.”
She travelled a lot as her child with her mother, which has fostered a huge respect in her for single mothers in that position:
“Even as a peripheral fringe dweller, there is still the desire for the normal things, to create a family, to have domesticl bliss...”
She sees Piet se Optelgoed as “a vehicle to be unapologetic.
“I’ve never thought what I wanted people to feel, it’s just been made.
“The responses have been interesting. Some people have been touched by the brutality, some by the humanity and others have found it funny”.
“I hope it is something that will disgust you and delight you and hopefully make you giggle. And hopefully it won’t make you feel sorry for her. Ther’s brutality in there, but at the end there’s hope. It’s not meant to be something that’s going to make you slit your wrists.”
Once she hands in her thesis in November, de Kock is contemplating what her next move will be, especially since it will involve settling down for a while, depending on where she finds work. First though, she is super excited about working as a facilitator on workshops in Cape Town as part of Pieter Toerien’s War Horse production.
Piet se Optelgoed is dark and not recommended to children under 16. Check www.capetownfringe.co.za for performance times and the exact schedule.