Europe 2009: Kortrijk, Belgium

Saturday June 26, 2009

Kortrijk [Core-tree], Belgium

The train to Kortrijk was like the LIRR except that it was fast and clean.  A young woman next to us was reading “The World According to Garp” in Dutch.  Across the aisle a Muslim girl gave her brother a hard time about the noise he was making with his Fanta Soda can.  The boy put up with it because next to his sister he could see his mother smiling at him.  Both women wore burkas. 

Lu’s friend Alice, her husband Floris and their son Daniel drove from Holland to meet us at the Humorologie Theatre Festival.  They were a lot of fun, totally up for anything.  The festival took place in a range of tents that had been set up in a giant meadow beside a stream.  The acts were from all over the world.  We saw a dance performance, a drum show and several clown acts.  The whole reason we had come to Belgium was because Lu wanted to see Yllana, a comedy troupe from Spain that she had seen in Brazil.  The show, called “The Brokers” (I lifted a clip from Youtube and put it in the video below), is a knock on Wall Street.  The whole show was done without speech, just lights, music, elaborate sound effects and physical acting.  It was hilarious.  One moment I will never forget: after the SWAT team stormed the broker’s apartment, found the cocaine he was hiding and, of course, snorted it, the music cranked and the policemen did a crazed hip-hop striptease down to their Speedos.  In the midst of their dance, the music segued into “Thriller” and one of the players broke out and did an amazing impersonation of Michael Jackson.  The audience went bananas.  Then one of the other cops dropped his gun and accidentally shot him.  The crowed roared.  Now clutching his chest, the dancer did a slow-motion fall to the ground and the mood in the theatre turned instantly somber.  The audience went silent.  The show, time, everything, stopped.  At the very last moment, the dancer broke the spell by blowing a kiss toward Heaven.  The audience roared louder than ever.  It was brilliant, a genuinely communal acknowledgement, both sacred and profane, of the passing of a much loved and troubled pop star.