Arts Centre Vooruit, Ghent, Belgium

Tine Van Aerschot picked 21 days in the eighties when truly nothing shocking happened. We relive the period with the help of diary excerpts of Trevor Wells, who chronicles trivial but remarkable moments of unexpected and strange human behaviour. TTTTG places a character with a vage outline centrally. The piece is a monologue by a single male character portrayed by two actresses: Tracy Wright (Me and You and Everyone We Know, Blindness) and the Dutch Carly Wijs (Vincent & Theo by Robert Altman, Toneelhuis, STAN, etc.). Van Aerschot’s 2007 debut piece I have no thoughts and this is one of them, in which a woman summed up everything she couldn’t or didn’t want to do, was a seemingly simple performance which left a big impression on the viewer.

a piece of text from the play: Excerpt 1

“December 2
December 2nd is the 336th day of the year – the 337th in a leap year.
There are 29 days remaining until the end of the year

Today I am sick. I am not what you would call seriously ill, it is just one of those cases of “I don’t know if I am having a common cold or the flu”. Lets just say I am snot sick and I feel miserable. At first I did not want to write anything at all today, but in a strange kind of way I feel it is my duty to write something every single day. My next thought of course being: I am not giving in to guilt; this self-imposed culpability makes no sense. I am not the diary police and I am certainly not a Christian anymore.”

Excerpt 2

“The other day I saw one of the most beautiful images I have ever seen. It was a photograph of a flag flying proud in the wind. Only the flag was a piece of clear plastic and you could see the little white clouds in the sky through it. The flag did not alter the clouds in a physical way, but mentally it shifted everything. I can not remember the name of the artist I will look it up tomorrow, but it made me think of this quote by
Breyten Breytenbach “That it should not be forgotten, at birth, a chameleon is transparent.”