Interview of Sébastien Van Kuijk

How did you find yourself taking part in Be With Me Now?

I didn’t join the team in the very beginning of the process. The production started in January 2015 by exploring and developing the main concept of the show with author and stage director Julien Fišera, musical director MaNOj Kamps, singers and instrumentalists. As I took part in the chamber music academy of the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence a couple of years ago, Emilie Delorme, general manager of enoa, asked me if I was interested in the project and I said yes! I was really excited to experience something new. Then I met Julien Fišera in Paris in order to discover more precisely what it was all about. Instantaneously, we connected as we both deeply wanted something new for our art.

How is this experience different from other projects you have done? What did you learn from it as an instrumentalist?

Be With Me Now is all about dialoguing and exchanging. The strength of this project is to gather artists from different disciplines (singers, instrumentalists, stage director, literary author, dramaturge, light artists, composers) and from different origins (French, Dutch, German, Polish, Portuguese, English, Chinese, Icelandic, Greek) on the same stage, trying all together to share in order to create. I think this idea is really powerful! Somehow, this story that starts with a clash (editor’s note: Tamino receives a break-up phone text from his girlfriend at the beginning of the performance) tells us metaphorically that something needs to be broken in order to start dreaming, to live our ideal way of expressing our hopes. The whole creation process leads us to ask these fundamental questions: can we understand each other? Can we dream together?

How did the creative process occur?

Be With Me Now is a collective creation. As we work differently, the creative process was really demanding. However it was fascinating to discover all these different ways of developing a project. Julien Fišera came with a story that he kept making evolve with the dramaturge Isabelle Kranabetter but also with the artists involved in the project as he wanted a vivid creative process: we would listen to everyone’s ideas, try things in order for each of us to find our character and position in the story. On the other side, singers need a motionless storytelling in order to explore in a “vertical” way their body movements and musical ideas. As an instrumentalist, I discovered how little knowledge I had regarding body language. However, despite of our fundamental differences, I really think everyone learned something in the process of creating this story that we all like.

What do you expect from the European tour?

Confronting our show to different audiences is really interesting. We’ve already seen diverse reactions between cities, sometimes the difference is huge! Be With Me Now is a non-conventional show and some people are not prepared for that. Indeed the story starts by destroying one of the most beautiful Mozart’s operas – The Magic Flute– in order to explore a colorful patchwork of European music! I really love this idea to meet different audiences in order to share with them something which -who knows- might be the beginning of a new art form.

Interview done the 4th November 2015