Gardenia is a gift to you, a togetherness you have not yet known.
January 2021. The cast meets again for a costume fitting, in preparation for the reprise of Gardenia. Between the fitting they look back on the performance they made ten years ago with Frank Van Laecke and Alain Platel. A reflection of that flashback from the perspective of Tessa Daluwein, who followed the preparations during her internship:
The world has changed a lot in the past decade. Our society is in transition and on that shaking, trembling ground, Gardenia welcomes her daughters back to the stage.
A bouquet of flowers welcomes you with all its colours and thorns.
In Gardenia, many lives come together in many people, a collection of experiences from different angles. These are eight portraits that step out of their way, overlap and contradict each other, embrace and push each other away.
"I think people are overwhelmed by the whole cast. You don't have a lead in Gardenia, the lead is that cast. And this worked wonderfully with all the clichés we could imagine."
Everyone who walks the stage of Gardenia brings their own life story. Gardenia is in transition, just like its actors and the world that surrounds it.
In Gardenia, clichés are transcended. Eyelashes are glued on, wigs are straightened, songs are sung and vulnerability becomes strength. You see mere illusions, only to dispel them minutes later.
You see people as male and female, transgender and homosexual, old and young. Above all, you see the space between this binary representation of what someone can be. People in all variations, people in intermediate stages, people who openly share what identity can be.
"We did an exercise to be a 'model' on the catwalk. I fantasised about it, but that's something where you think, 'Yeah, that's never going to happen anyway'.
We could do that here.
And it was a party every time. That's why I did it with such conviction: 'Here, now I'll show what I can do."
Gardenia is about saying goodbye, about the end of an era. Growing older is inevitable but this knowledge does not make it any easier to accept. Ten years pass, not from twenty to thirty but from sixty to seventy. The body moves differently, her neck holds her head high, her legs struggle with the sloping stage even more, her hips sway to a different rhythm. Time passes differently, lives do not change as quickly as before but the change itself is insurmountable.
Gardenia starts from the end to the beginning. We have left people behind; we have thanked our audience. The garland has lost a flower. We hold a minute's silence.
The sloping stage challenges, the dressing table becomes the storage bin, the scene a landscape that keeps changing. The fight has no clear sides, no clear winner. They hold on to each other, push the other away, seek redemption with all their zest for life. Their transformation is not without sacrifice.
"That is a fight with myself. The opponent is a part of me. The two things that I have in me. Both masculinity and femininity. Vulnerability but strength. Continuing and giving up. Beauty as well as ugliness. Attracting and repelling. Holding on and pushing away.”
Beauty does not expire but reaches further and further until every unknown territory is its own. Gardenia is a performance that gives beauty a new face. A face that grows older, is made up and transformed. Above all, it exposes a truth and shows you transience. Gardenia is a gift to you, a togetherness you have not yet known.
“Un merveilleux bouquet de fleurs.”
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