The Blind – LOD (Gent)
Patrick Corillon & Daan Janssens, after Maurice Maeterlinck
Maurice Maeterlinck shares the fate of many other Nobel Prize winners in Literature: a few streets or avenues are named after him, his complete works are available in deluxe editions, but his plays are rarely performed (with the exception of *Pelléas et Mélisande*, thanks to Claude Debussy).
In 2011, LOD will present The Blind (1890), a forgotten gem by the Ghent-born Symbolist, in a version adapted for chamber ensemble. It will be exactly one hundred years since Maeterlinck (who was barely forty at the time) was awarded the Nobel Prize.
LOD remains true to its usual working method, which involves bringing together creators from different backgrounds. For the adaptation of Maeterlinck’s one-act play – brief but no less fascinating for that – the young Ghent-based composer Daan Janssens (born 1983) and the Liège-based visual artist and theatre practitioner Patrick Corillon (born 1959) have joined forces. Alongside his work as a composer, Janssens conducts the Nadar Ensemble, which specialises in performing contemporary music, notably works by Luciano Berio, Stockhausen and Morton Feldman.
The work of Patrick Corillon, a visual artist by training, lies at the intersection of literature, theatre and installation art. Whilst the materials and media he employs are constantly changing, the themes of his work display a remarkable consistency. Each of his works explores the relationship between cultural tradition and modernity, identity and language. The artist revisits these themes in his interpretation of The Blind.
A Blind Man at The Museum
In the 1880s, the Parisian press hailed Maeterlinck, who was barely in his twenties, as one of the most talented playwrights of the time. His voice and style were deemed unprecedented, his vision of theatre and tragedy unparalleled. The avant-garde theatre of the ‘enfant terrible’ from Ghent, which defied established norms, found an almost immediate resonance among the great composers of the time. Pelléas et Mélisande, a play that was performed only once in 1893, was set to music by numerous major composers or inspired one of their works. In addition to Claude Debussy (1902), this was the case for Gabriel Fauré (1989), William Wallace (1900), Arnold Schönberg (1903) and Jean Sibelius (1905), even though Maeterlinck had absolutely no musical sense (ironically, Claude Debussy wrote in one of his letters this little phrase about Maeterlinck: ‘He goes into a Beethoven symphony like a blind man into a museum…’). But whilst Maeterlinck’s influence on his contemporary composers was considerable, it is astonishing to what extent his works were ignored after the Second World War. The exception is the chamber opera Die Blinden (1989) by the Austrian composer Beat Furrer (born 1954), based, amongst other things, on Maeterlinck’s Les Aveugles (as well as on texts by Rimbaud, Hölderlin and Plato).
“Let’s not talk about our eyes”
Strictly speaking, Daan Janssens and Patrick Corillon are therefore the first to adapt *Les Aveugles* for musical theatre. But it is no coincidence that both Beat Furrer and Daan Janssens chose *Les Aveugles*. According to Daan Janssens, it is perhaps Maeterlinck’s most abstract and least typically symbolist text. In some respects, Les Aveugles is closer to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot than to Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande. Indeed, in Les Aveugles, we do not find the fairy-tale quality and the symbolist devices characteristic of his other dramatic works, such as the personification of abstract concepts like Love and Death – with a capital letter – which often seems slightly kitsch nowadays.
*The Blind* draws the audience into the verbal groping of twelve blind people gathered on stage. In an autumnal forest shrouded in twilight, they await the return of the priest who will lead them back within the protective walls of the institution they left that morning for a walk. The priest, extremely old, is perched on a rock amidst the blind men, six on one side and six on the other. He is dead, as we learn from Maeterlinck’s detailed stage directions preceding the text. In the first part of The Blind, Maeterlinck succeeds in creating a prolonged dramatic standstill, composed of short lines (rarely exceeding a single sentence) from the blind men who do not leave their places and speak – literally and figuratively – past one another, creating a comic effect on several occasions. They offer their opinions on the priest’s return. The ominous sounds they hear set their imaginations alight: the flight of nocturnal birds, the wind in the fallen leaves, the surf of the nearby sea. As the play progresses, their interpretation of the signals sent to them by nature increasingly points towards an imminent catastrophe: death.
When the blind people discover the body of the deceased priest, Maeterlinck pushes the dramatic tension to its peak, without, however, offering a resolution. Footsteps come to a halt in the middle of the group. “Who are you?” cries a blind woman holding a crying baby in her arms. “Have mercy on us! ” – Silence. – The child cries even more desperately.
‘I do not know the nature of this sound’:
The Blind as a Philosophical Parable
Patrick Corillon emphasises that his role in this production is that of a ‘visual artist’. He is keen to provide a tangible, physical counterbalance to the ephemeral nature of the texts and the music. Meanwhile, discussions between the composer and the artist have resulted in a stage design concept which – as they point out – may still change radically.
Corillon and Janssens’ starting point was this question: what significance might The Blind hold as an existential parable? To what exactly are the blind men in the story—and, by extension, ‘Western man’—blind? The answer formulated by Patrick Corillon, and translated into a physical form, offers a radical reinterpretation of *The Blind*, influenced by David Abram’s ecophilosophy. Abram asserts that Western man, unlike peoples close to nature, has become alienated from his environment and the sensory experiences associated with it. He establishes a link between this alienation and the emergence of writing (the origins of ‘history’), and more specifically the alphabet. Written language has rendered speech mute and dulled our sensory relationship with the world. According to Abram, primordial peoples remain in the state preceding ‘the fall’ into the literate state; their language is derived from nature and is in harmony with it. In contrast, Western man lives in and through the world, but no longer experiences it. Abram asserts that this alienation lies at the root of the catastrophic exploitation of our ecosystem.
Patrick Corillon, however, avoids the trap of transforming *The Blind* into yet another apocalyptic parable offering an impressive and captivating aestheticized vision of the end times, thereby numbing the fear it inspires in us. He establishes connections between, on the one hand, Abram’s ideas about language, the sensory dimension, and alienation, and, on the other hand, Maeterlinck’s language. Corillon observes that the language of the blind is remarkably “hollow”: “The blind try to ward off the threat of the forest by exchanging trivial and meaningless formulas. ‘I’m afraid when I don’t speak,’ says ‘the third man born blind.’ Their words seem hollow under the effect of their daily use; their language is banal and dull. They are incapable of reading the language of the forest and of nature.” The wind, the sound of the waves, and the rustling of birds’ wings are ominous signs of death. Only by touching the priest’s body do they take a step away from blind groping and toward clairvoyance: it is a vision of their mortality. Patrick Corillon thus sees the terrifying end of The Blind as an existential tragedy on an individual level, but also as a reconciliation with nature in death, a recognition of the lightness of existence: the ceaseless ebb and flow of life and death, nothing more than a shiver in the face of eternity, like the vibration of a musical instrument’s string.