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Document Details : Title: Jan Decorte's 'Childlike' Poetics in Betonliebe + Fleischkrieg: Medeia Author(s): DE POURCQ, Maarten Journal: Pharos Volume: 17 Issue: 1 Date: 2009-2010 Pages: 117-135 DOI: 10.2143/PHA.17.1.2136896 Abstract : The classic can be seen as a site of plenitude enabling the moderns to articulate their contingent position between past and future by the very act of translating a classic. A case in point is the Medea adaptation of Jan Decorte (Belgium, 2002). Decorte always works with classical texts from the Western repertoire in order to confront the audience with the critical state of their existential condition. Decorte imposes on these classics a radical poetics which he himself terms ‘childlike’. He transforms the original by stripping it down to an emphatically primitive text and performance. The choice for this ‘childlike’ poetics — that is to say, for this troping of a classic into a basic, somewhat naive and burlesque version, echoing Heiner Müller’s dramaturgy — moves the text into the contact zone with the present. It revokes the ‘classical’ status of the ‘classic’ and blends the tragic with the comical. This article discusses the major lines along which Decorte reworked Euripides’ Medea. |
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