When Dreams Do Show Thee Me

I spent three days last week in Belgium with Caroline, seeing two further performances of the joint RSC / Opera North production of Shakespeare’s sonnets set to music, Gavin Bryars’ Nothing Like The Sun, at Gent’s Handelsbeurs venue. We’d already attended the earlier Spring performances in the UK (two in Stratford-upon-Avon, plus Nottingham, Gateshead, Manchester and Leeds), so we were encountering it again after a nine-month break.
Many of Bryars’ collaborators for this production were familiar to me (Antony Hegarty & Nico Muhly, Alexander Balanescu, Mira Calix, Gavin Friday and Natalie Merchant), but his own music is pretty much off the map as far as my regular tastes are concerned. It took me a few performances to get to grips with this eclectic and occasionally rather intense collection, but now I love it. Hopefully a recording might be on the cards next year.

Gent itself is lovely. It’s fairly representative of Belgium in many ways: pretty without being twee, an eclectic blend of medieval and art deco. It combines the best of northern and southern European culture: direct but never abrupt, stylish but never haughty, good-humoured without being crass, exuding a quiet but friendly confidence. Great food and drink too. Belgium as a whole is a place I’d definitely like to explore further.
Specific recommendations that I can make after 48 hours in Gent would be the cosy, wood-panelled Café des Arts on Schouwburgstraat, the zinc-and-mirrors deco dream of the Grand Café on the corner of Schouwburgstraat & Kouter, the old-world charm of the Hotel den Yzer on Vlaanderenstraat and the Café Leffe on Botermarkt. You might get the impression from this list that all we did was drink coffee & beer and eat delicious food. You might well be right.

In theory, there’s no such thing as “Belgian culture” as it’s a country of three separate regions. The northern Flemish Belgians (who constitute 58% of the population and whose language is a dialect of Dutch) dominate the country, with the southern, French-oriented Walloon Belgians (32%, speaking a dialect of French) in the minority. Brussels/Bruxelles constitutes the remaining 10% and is officially bi-lingual.
One late-night conversation in the Café des Arts summed up the multiculturalism of the place best, when we ended up in a three-way conversation between the Dutch woman speaking in English, the French-speaking Walloon insisting on conversing in Flemish and the Englishman doing his best in French as a courtesy. The oddest thing was that it wasn’t odd. Language shimmered in the air like an insubstantial mist, never obscuring the bedrock of meaning.