Episode 40 -Jerome Maeckelbergh

Published: July 31, 2019, 11 a.m.

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Jer\\xf4me Maeckelbergh studied Fine Arts (painting and sculpture), and drunk too much with drama students, who later became directors. This resulted in a scenographers career with a first production in 1974. He has designed more than 50 productions, with work selected for the PQ \'83 ("Shunt on to a siding" by Geiffrig) and \'87 ("The possessed" by Albert Camus, "The bear and the Pasha" by Eug\\xe8ne Scribe, "Richard III" by William Shakespeare), and for Novi Sad in \'84 ("Man is man" by Bertold Brecht, "Around the world in 80 days" by Pavel Kohout, "Oedipus" by Hugo Claus). He designed for drama and musicals as free-lancer, combining this with designing and making special props, masks and sculpture for countless other productions. He was awarded in Antwerp for designing "Rashomon" by Kanin in 1980, for "Oedipus" in a dramatization of Hugo Claus in 1981, and for "The possessed" by Albert Camus in 1984. Half of his design work was by order of the famous "Royal Youth Theatre" in Antwerp, where he finally became Head of Design in 1993. Resigned from the Royal Youth Theatre in 2000, he continued to be involved as representative for Belgium in OISTAT, the International Organization of Scenographers,Theatre Architects and Technicians. OISTAT had a project running, Theatre Words, that started in 1975 were theatre professionals from around the world collected, translated and edited the most common theatre terms into a multilingual dictionary. To keep pace with new developments in the field, a new upgrade of the content was needed together with a switch from printed to digital version. With the support of Michael Ramsaur who managed the adaptations of the content, Jerome then developed Digital Theatre Words as an application with a multilingual interface that was first launched during the Prague Quadrennial 2011. A new upgrade is foreseen in July 2017 for World Stage Design in Taipei. In May 2012 Jerome for the first time learned by chance, during an Executive Committee Meeting of OISTAT in Egypt by all means, that the historic theatre machinery of the Bourla theatre in Antwerp would be dismantled in sake of modernization. Being the last large municipal theatre in Europe with its historic architecture combined with the original machinery from 1834 that still is in exceptional condition, this would be a big loss not only for Antwerp but for European theatre culture. Many presentations, peaking in 2014 at the international conference "Wood and Canvas (and rabbit glue) in the Modern World" that Jerome organized with the help of Peter McKinnon under the wings of the York University in Canada, resulted in the nomination by Europa Nostra of this historic theatre machinery as one of the seven most endangered sites of 2014 in Europe. This resulted in a shut down of the renovation plans and a concourse for a new approach keeping the heritage machinery on its historic place. Jerome\'s quest grew out to a presentation called "Heritage Theatre Machinery: unexpected possibilities in contemporary productions" that has been shown already on many places in the world. Originating from his presentation with a scale model 1/10 during the Wood and Canvas conference, this evolved to a projected presentation with video captures from the many unexpected possibilities demonstrated in the 1/10 scale model, supplemented with animated drawings explaining the techniques used and the rigging of it. Besides a revaluation of this historical technique in contemporary theatrical use, this presentation can also be seen as a plea towards designers for out of the box thinking, for students as well as for professionals.

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