Karel Vanhaesebrouck
Karel Vanhaesebrouck is a professor and chair of theatre studies at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, where he teaches courses in the MA program “Arts du spectacle vivant” and acts as a director of CiASp, centre de recherche en cinéma et arts du spectacle. Prior to coming to Brussels, Vanhaesebrouck was an assistant professor at Maastricht University and worked as postdoctoral researcher at the VUB. Karel Vanhaesebrouck is a member of the “Jonge Academie” (2015-2020). He acts as a co-director of the THEA Research Group, a cross-institutional (VUB, ULB, RITS) research group facilitating artistic and scientific research within the broad fields of theatre and performance. In 2013 Vanhaesebrouck’s research was awarded the Prize “Laureaat van de Koninklijke Vlaamse academie voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten in de Klasse van de kunsten” by the Royal Flemish Academy of Sciences and Arts in Belgium). Karel Vanhaesebrouck also works as a theory lecturer at the Brussel-based film and theatre school RITCS (www.ritcs.be), the Royal Institute of Theatre, Cinema and Sound of the Erasmus University College, where he coordinated the theatre department from 2010 up to 2017. In 2015 the Flemish Minister of Culture, Sven Gatz, discerned the Flemish Cultural Award for Performing Arts 2014 to the theatre department of RITCS. He is also a guest professor of theatre history at ESACT Liège.
Phone: +32 (0)2 650 44 57
Address: Avenue F. Roosvelt 50
1050 Bruxelles
Phone: +32 (0)2 650 44 57
Address: Avenue F. Roosvelt 50
1050 Bruxelles
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Articles by Karel Vanhaesebrouck
In its seminal performance Kamp, the Dutch theatre company Hotel Modern addresses this question by
literally restaging the experience of Auschwitz on a miniature scale. Kamp is not just a simple attempt
to commemorate a particularly painful episode in our recent Western history, the performance makes
the spectator think about what we experience as ‘real’ in this recollection and, at the same time, how
this memory is determined by various cultural conventions. This self-reflexive perspective, I will argue,
is a truly baroque strategy. In this article I will therefore return to the religious wars at the end of the
16th and the beginning of the 17th century. There, too, concrete violent historical circumstances led to
a fundamentally violent theatrical imagination, to a spectacular ‘theatre of the real’. At the same time,
this theatre simultaneously put itself, or rather the idea of theatrical representation itself, at stake. It is
this meta-perspective that makes it possible not only to show the unbearable, but also to understand the
constructed nature of historical memory.