Abke Haring is an extraordinary case. 35. Dutch by origin, but working in Belgium pretty well continuously since 1997. First as a student at the Studio Herman Teirlinck. Shortly after graduating as an actress in productions by Luk Perceval. A little later with Lotte van den Berg, Josse de Pauw and Guy Cassiers. With her pale complexion, dark hair and above all her intense presence on stage, she didn’t go unnoticed for long. She now writes and performs her own oeuvre: Nageslachtsfarce/genocide, Kortstond, HOOP, Linoleum/speed, HOUT, FLOU, TRAINER…

In January 2014 we had several different conversations about acting. She is rehearsing Guy Cassiers’ Hamlet vs Hamlet. She is playing Hamlet. Tom Lanoye has written a new script. His Hamlet is ‘on’ all the time; the protagonist’s share of the script is not for the fainthearted. Abke studies and rehearses. She beats the living daylights out of it, she tells me. I want to know from her if writing and acting have always gone hand in hand, right from the beginning when she started studying at the Studio Herman Teirlinck.

Abke Haring: “Actually it started much earlier, at secondary school. In Dutch lessons I was asked to write things and to read them out. It seems I was good at that; the teachers were interested in what I did. That’s when I discovered, and also later at the Studio, that I could combine writing and speaking, that I could speak my words on a stage. And that this could be ‘work’ for me.   

I have always written. What I wrote was more poetry than personal jottings. There was a lot of laughing and joking in the first couple of years at the Studio, with Chiel Van Berkel, Manou Kersting, Stef Bos and others. It was just a question of who could be the funniest. After all, what greater gift is there than to make someone laugh? It was cabaret. But that’s not what I had chosen. I had done an audition for drama. I was put in the cabaret section but I was convinced I was there for drama. So I never really wrote serious stuff until the last year when I produced Nageslachtsfarce/genocide. I thought I would burn my bridges with it. I was convinced of it. At the same time that script – which is about a mother’s mental illness – was not only serious, but also a lot of laughs. I was looking for a way of showing it all – pain, but also strength and humour. In that play I discovered language as a weapon.”

At that time did you see yourself as an actress who was going to perform your own scripts?  

Abke Haring: “No, I’ve never seen myself as an actress and actually I still don’t. I increasingly understand acting because I’ve been doing it for eleven years now. While I was studying I hardly had an acting lesson; three weeks of Mark Verstraete and that was it. There were lots of music lessons, for example with Wannes Van de Velde. And dramaturgy with Gommer Van Rousselt.”

You say you now know what acting is, so what is it?   

Abke Haring: “In my opinion it is speaking as clearly as possible on a stage, literally and figuratively. Literally, speaking as clearly as possible and knowing what you are saying. It is all about having a clear connection with what you say. About it coming from where you’re at. You are your own instrument. What you say has to come from a place where you are, from what you are, not somewhere next to you or behind you. You are it.” 

How do you see your work as an actress with the various directors you have now worked with?    

Abke Haring: “When I started work with Luk Perceval on Het kouwe kind, I had just finished school and I had absolutely no idea what would be asked of me. At the time I had only done Nageslachtsfarce. I took a good look at the people around me, like Koen van Kaam, whose sweetheart I had to play. I could only do it intuitively. I also remember a work placement during my course with Manou Kersting’s Podium Modern when I kept asking Kristien De Proost if I was acting ‘properly’, if I was doing what was asked of me. I really had no idea what acting was. 

Then Luk asked me to be in Turista. The show was staged at the Bourla, on piles over the pit, with mirrors and knives, blindfolded actors, a hole in the middle for falling into and hot Svoboda lamps just above our heads. I played a moron speaking in broad Dutch. I did everything at fever pitch, I lost weight, I ate three bananas a day, but I ‘gave’ much too much. I didn’t know that until I suffered nervous exhaustion. I didn’t know how to pace myself. I have learned that I can’t go too far. I now have a sort of alarm bell in my head, I also exercise and watch what I eat.”

You have since covered the whole trajectory with Guy Cassiers, from Mefisto for ever through Atropa and Bloed & rozen, to Hamlet vs Hamlet. What do you see as the main differences between the two directors?

Abke Haring: “The main difference is that Luk understands the psyche and plays with it. Guy also understands it but he holds it in check. He keeps it to himself. And he understands the material.”

What does that mean to you as an actress?

Abke Haring: “That I was always on my guard with Luk: ‘What will I be asked to do?’, ‘What will today bring?’ That suspense is scary, thrilling. ‘What’s going to happen?’ ‘Will we go naked today? Will there be kissing, shouting, hitting? Will there be emotional pressure?’

With Guy there’s none of that. With him, the first question is ‘Will I be in the frame or not?’ And then after a while, ‘What can I do?’ ‘What can I give?’ With Guy it is much more a question of you doing it than being asked to.... Luk is also a very quiet director, but with him you sense that it’s all about feelings that want to come out. With Guy you have to express your feelings yourself. He won’t ask. 

There’s no limit to the raw candour and openness I can give Guy. There’s no guardedness. That’s what he asked of me in Bloed & rozen. When at the beginning I asked him for the right words, he said: ‘You begin with the word safety.’ I played on that. So I stood there, the curtain still closed, and I thought ‘safety’. Then I think you get a very candid something because you are safe, you don’t have to act anything. That began in Atropa with my role as Iphigenia. Vulnerability was the word there.”

Do you now have a word for Hamlet?

Abke Haring: “Yes, but I can’t tell you what it is yet.”

How far have you got with Hamlet now that you are four weeks into rehearsals? Who is this Hamlet?

Abke Haring: “I have no idea. It’s not something that concerns me and I don’t want it to.”

Can you say something about how you are tackling your role then?

Abke Haring: “I look for a translation of something that is very private. I try and find it in a safe atmosphere. I try to see myself, where I am and who I am. I try and explore my own feelings, to keep hold of them. First I do that alone, in private. Then by the time it comes to rehearsal, I have it in the bag. If I feel safe, I play with it. It’s very much a thing of the moment, with friendly, familiar faces around me. If I don’t feel safe I won’t perform well.   

It’s different for everyone. The Toneelgroep Amsterdam actors [half the cast in this coproduction is from Toneelgroep Amsterdam, Ed.] dare to throw themselves into the script. I think I tend to throw myself into the bits in-between the text. It’s important to me that I have that text, but also that there is something very different underneath it which I do something with.

What I really don’t want to do is perform with the script from the standpoint of who Hamlet is. That he is a 14-year-old boy who walks or stands in a certain way and so has these and these feelings.... I don’t want to do any of that, I want to perform it in the moment.”

How exactly do you do that?

Abke Haring: “In this rehearsal process we work in a very fragmented way. When Guy wants to begin on a scene – always a leap in the dark for me –,  I ask him what Hamlet has experienced before that. In this case it was an argument with Ophelia. That tells me enough. I go and sit in his head: ’argument’, ‘sense of loneliness’… You hold onto that mood, you prepare your words, you nurse those feelings and it all comes together. If you know the script well, you really have control over it.   

As Joan of Arc in Bloed & rozen, I had a monologue which I did sitting on the floor at the back of the stage. A lot then depends on my breathing. There’s a a great deal of emotion in it for me, you can take very short breaths and then the emotions run very high, or you can breathe calmly. I had to begin that monologue with ‘Alone, abandoned and betrayed’, and once those words were there I was in control.”

But when you rehearse a role like Hamlet, you must have some sort of picture of that character?   

Abke Haring: “No, I don’t. I have a secret, but I’m not going to disclose it! Some scenes are close to my heart, like the scene between Hamlet and his mother. I have a thing with my mother and Tom Lanoye knows that. He didn’t write that scene for nothing: a mother, a child, the mother who betrays the child. Well, then you have my source. There are things in that weighty dialogue that I really want to say. We rehearsed it recently in the Bourla attic, under fluorescent lighting with two trainees behind the table. How much more exposed can you be than that? How many thresholds do you have to cross? Yet I knew exactly what I wanted with the mother: we had to touch each other. That’s what I wanted. ‘Confess your crime, do penance, show remorse.’ I know all about that.”

Your way of acting is powerful because your sheer physical intensity gives the script great lucidity. How do you configure all that?  

Abke Haring: “I don’t. I don’t configure it. My life is like that. I cry because I see a leaf that is a beautiful green colour. My whole life is incredibly intense. That’s the way I am. Why act? Because people ask me to act. Because I have discovered that I can earn a living from it. Because people appreciate what I do, I think: ‘You can see that part of me’. And again. And again. Otherwise I would never have dared do it. It’s something very personal but because it happens within the institution of the theatre – with its codes of doors that open and lights that dim – you can see that part of me. But that is very expensive, costly. It is something very sincere, which I have never learned to mask. Sometimes I’m very jealous of people who can ‘perform’ all that.”

Are you saying: ‘I don’t act it’?

Abke Haring: “No, I never act it. I can’t. I don’t want to either. I embody it. Everyone around me on stage knows that. It’s very ambiguous: I don’t act it, but others do, and you come across them. Then I think: ‘Where are you? I don’t need to see that acting, I want to see you’. But I have also learned that just acting can be OK too. Though I have to say I don’t come across that many people that are real on stage. That’s why I always feel almost shameful about how I approach things.”

Your own work is often associated with performance whereas you are a hyper-linguistic actress. How do you explain this?

Abke Haring: “When I make my own shows, I find that most is said in silence. That’s how I am in life too: feeling and being. And also lots of bullshitting, but you do that because there are other people around. Feeling and being is a much bigger part of who I am. In silence you can do so much: how you look at each other, where you stand, are you close or far away? Your attitude: are you confident?, are you unsure? That’s what it’s about for me. It’s the same with photographs... I like photographs without people. Photographs don’t talk either, they speak in silence.

Because I want to say so many things and use words to do that, I have a problem. Because words have a colour, a past, a place, everyone has a different image of them, etc. I would actually prefer to make images or movements but it is always words which come. Moreover, there are far too many words and there is far too much that I want to say, like feelings, moments, thoughts, breathing spaces, a whole head full... All that has to be compressed into words, and then just three of them, because bullshitting doesn’t cover everything. Nothing covers everything, something else has to cover everything, and that is the body…”

‘Trip theatre’ is a term that has been used about your work. How do you feel about that?

Abke Haring: “At first I thought it was nonsense, but I do understand that you have to give it a name; now I’m quite happy about it because it gives people a ‘handle’. Particularly with HOUT in which I was really focused. That production was an eye-opener for me, because I had the courage to make everything I wanted to make, i.e. colours. When I think back to that production, I see only colours: from a dusky hue through light blue to shades of red. It was a painting. I would like to make ten shows like that and then die. It is of course about human relationships, but I didn’t just want to talk about that, except on an unconscious level. And then ‘trip theatre’ is a good title.”

When you work with other actors on your own scripts, what do you work on most?   

Abke Haring: “When I began working on FLOU with Han Kerckhoffs, he asked me to explain to him very clearly what I wanted of him. He found it a strange way of ‘being’ in theatre. We started doing very embarrassing improvisations because I didn’t have the words to explain to him how I wanted him ‘to be’ on stage, how he should ‘stand’. I am still learning how to explain that and what to call it. What exactly do I mean when I ask someone to ‘stand’? Also, that actor should be able to do it in such a way that he feels free, because that is what I feel when I ‘stand’ there. Free to do what I want on that stage, to decide if I will stand still or not. I introduced balls, boxes and costumes into those improvizations with Han and as a result we achieved a state of total candour and openness with each other. We came to realize it was all about candour, sensitivity to each other. At that point we started rehearsing our lines: looking, not at each other, but straight ahead. As there is less and less text in that production, for him it was increasingly about feeling, and about the physicality of that: walking slowly and moving... After the show we always had to look each other in the eyes for a moment. He was very emotional about that. In a way that was something entirely new for him and that makes me really happy because Han had already done a lot as an actor.”

You also have a very real physical presence in your own plays...   

Abke Haring: “In my own work I am a sort of translator: ‘Dare to see!’ That is really what I do. ‘Look at me, stay with me, look.’ In HOOP the protagonist is distraught, desperate. It is about someone who wants something (from a mother), but doesn’t get it. She says: ‘Speak to me, show yourself,’ but it doesn’t work. Linoleum/speed – a dialogue between a daughter and her mother – is: ‘I am strong, I am strong, I am going to put an end to it, but that end lasts a very long time. Kortstond – a play for two brothers and a house – is ‘déjà vu’, ‘looking back on what happened’. FLOU – about a man and a woman – is the impossibility of being together and making it impossible by being together. TRAINER is looking for insight and eventually accepting it, not being afraid of it. That’s what I am concerned with at the moment, insight, spirituality.”

Can you explain that?

Abke Haring: “It may be strange but in HOUT that’s how I very deliberately added something under the production itself: I walked past the seats and put down a thought; that’s also how I act. I cast a web over the people and, with the people who are able, I do an unconscious exercise. Sometimes people come to me at the end and say: ‘I know what it is that is occupying your mind, I saw it. It’s spirituality’. That is magical. That makes me really happy. Meditation, that’s what interests me. Isn’t the mind an extraordinary thing! Acting also has something to do with it: setting a path with an audience, paths which converge, that is a web. Sometimes I go on stage and say: ‘I’m the boss’, ‘now you’ll come to me’. 

That’s what I find so interesting about acting, that it has to do with your body, your mind, the here and now, seduction… If you can’t see all that, you become very unhappy as an actor. Touching that spiritual substratum is the ultimate reward and that’s why it was so liberating to play Joan of Arc. Because she epitomizes spirituality; she hears voices, I could invoke God; it’s not God that interests me, but invoking something, yes, that is something I want to do. It’s talking to invisible spirits and then I feel like a fish in water. Just let me do that.” 

How do you manage to find and reproduce that same intensity evening after evening?

Abke Haring: “That’s a Buddhist exercise; it is being in the here and now. That’s the only thing you can do. As an actor you are the instrument of the now. You are that, now. And conveying to the audience what is there, what is in the air, that is acting. That is the only thing, I think. Sharpen your instrument and be ready; ready and open, and we’re off, open and in the here and now. That’s how I act.”

Published in Etcetera #136, March 2014