VTi (Vlaams Theater Instituut)
Compagnie de Koe
De KOE was set up in 1989 by Peter Van den Eede and Bas Teeken. Since Teeken’s departure, Peter Van den Eede has been in charge. Today he works with a permanent core team of actor-creators whose members are Natali Broods, Stefaan Van Brabandt and Willem de Wulf.
De KOE is known for its experimental, poetic, abstract, identifiable, alienating yet simple theatre. The group aims to make ‘enchantingly sincere theatre’ based on a ‘philosophical embarrassment about humankind and the world’. This is achieved by investigating the nature of humankind in all its complexity: eternally caught between love for others and self-love, between hunger for power and sense of duty, between insight and emotion, between lucidity and insanity. All the tricks of the theatre are questioned or undermined. For De KOE, theatre must be transparent in order to be able to confront the audience head-on. By entering into a dialogue, open and as honest as possible, between the personality of the actor, his character and the audience, the makers want to push the ‘here and now’ sensation of the theatre to the extreme.
The concept of ‘communication’ is key to their play, acting, form, content and dramaturgy. For them, theatre remains an ideal medium for bringing people together and allowing them to take part in a communal experience. They see each performance as a miniature society.
The company’s theatre-makers write their own plays or choose material by kindred spirits. They identify with work by artists such as Chekhov, Greenaway, Allen and Solandz, in which they are primarily attracted by the cheerful pessimism and razor-sharp analysis of the human soul. From the very beginning, de KOE has wanted its theatre to strip mankind bare, though with great compassion and using naive, disarming self-mockery and poetry. In order to achieve ‘purification by identification’, the company’s actor-writers first bare themselves. With shameless honesty, they want to show man as he truly is, in all his beauty and ugliness, as both hero and victim of the story he makes for himself.
