#ijs I definitely cried when I was writing this

[sirenascales]

Can I get a head canon request for Akutagawa, Dazai, and Chuuya? I would like it to be with a reader who gets extremely irritable and short-tempered when they’re having an anxiety attack and the reader accidentally lashes out at them? (And thank you 😂 I am one of those shy anons)

note: oof, i am definitely someone who has lashed out because of anxiety so 😬😬😬 yikes. still, this was fun to write!

warnings: slightest twinge of angst????

-> Akutagawa, Dazai, and Chuuya's s/o lashing out at them because of anxiety.

it was just a small little spat

but it was enough for your already fragile mindset to have you lash out at your boyfriend

"jesus fuck, can't you just shut up for five fucking minutes!"

you never even knew your voice could sound so sharp and harsh

and honestly, akutagawa didnt deserve that. it really wasnt anything serious

you just took a deep breath and try to walk away

but a tight grip on your arm stops you, cause there was no way akutagawa was going to let you speak to him like that

"I dont know whats going on with you, but you better watch who exactly you're talking to like that"

bro imagine his voice 😩 ahem anyways

that doesn't help lmfao but akutagawa doesnt let you go

"something is obviously bothering you, so talk."

"i don't wanna talk"

"clearly, you want to yell at me when i haven't done anything to you."

he was right, of course, and you started to feel a bit bad. it wasnt his fault that you were so anxious and irritable, so you lashing out was not cool

"can i have five minutes first?"

"of course. then we will talk."

basically... akutagawa will not put up with any of it. he understands that you will have hard days, but he also will not allow himself to be used as a verbal punching bag... he's had enough of that from a certain someone.

dazai was being annoying... as per usual. but you didn't mind it one bit.

he was your annoying boyfriend, and that is what you loved about him

but today wasn't a good day for you

everything was going wrong and it just caused you to have the worst anxiety

and with that comes irritated and aggravation

you tried to keep it to yourself, not wanting to bring attention to yourself

but as dazai babbled on and on about nothing

you couldn't stop yourself from speaking

"shut the fuck up! shut up! fuck!"

"..." bro is stunned, and he just watches you storm away to your shared bedroom, hearing the door slam closed

just what was that all about

meanwhile, you're sitting on your bed, hands covering your face as guilt immediately crept into your chest

dazai didn't deserve that, and you felt so bad

and that seemed to finally triggered some ij you because you just started to sob uncontrollably

from the guilt of you lashing out against your boyfriend, and from your own stress and mental state

"i-i'm sorry..." you cried, feeling dazai wrap his arms around you, him coming right to you when he heard you crying

"shh, it's okay... we can talk about this later..." he whispered, pressing your face against his chest, letting you cry as he sighed deeply

this guy lmao

it honestly wont be fucking pretty when you lash out at him for whatever reason

cause he will 100% say something right back to you

not really noticing and it was your anxiety making you so irritable not that it was any excuse

"can you stop acting like i give a fuck?! I don't fucking care, chuuya! bitch about it to someone else!"

chuuya is first looking at you like... yo wtf?

then he's scowling like "clearly im bothering you. call me when you stop acting like a bitch."

and he would leave and you would feel sooooo bad

like sure he was going off about things that didn't make sense to you

but you didn't want him to think that you thought he was a bother or anything

he just wanted to talk to you

and no matter how bad you felt, talking to him that way was unacceptable

so you went and quickly found him. thankfully, he didnt try to stop you as you hugged him from behind, pressing your face against his back"

"i was a jerk... 'm sorry..."

he sighs "sorry for calling you a bitch..."

he would let you hold him for a while, rubbing on your arms before looking at you from over his shoulder

"let's go get some wine"

Send your requests here!

#bsd x reader #chuuya x reader #dazai x reader #akutagawa x reader

[thissurroundingall]

Naomi Velissariou

Actor, and theatre maker, playing with pride and perspective

Nederlandstalige versie

Date of interview: June 7, 2017

Estimated reading time: 16 minutes

Naomi Velissariou (°1984) grew up near Genk, city of Ford, in a Flemish-Greek family. After graduating from the Maastricht Academy of Performing Arts as an actor in 2012, Velissariou created for Frascati in Amsterdam and appeared in several plays, movies and a television show. For her last play Sontag, she dived in to the works of the American philosopher and author Susan Sontag and wrote down her own thoughts in the essay ‘Mens durf te falen!’ (Dare to fail!) for De Correspondent. Despite, or maybe thanks to, the acceptance of failure as a virtue, Velissariou got quite some attention and recognition for her theatre work, and is considered a voice of a new generation. Velissariou has ‘a personal signature that makes us curious for future development’, as the Charlotte Köller Award Jury put it, who rewarded her with an encouragement award. Drawing inspiration from Müller, Aristotle, Sartre and Sontag, her theatre work is clever, trying to link the philosophical to a rich inner world and challenge her audience.

We visit Velissariou on a rainy day in Amsterdam. After a journey across’t Ij by ferry and a windy walk through Amsterdam Noord we are warmly welcomed. As soon as the door opens, Velissariou is constantly moving around. She pours some tea and puts nuts and chocolates on the table, while her ginger tomcat Kevin cries for attention. Before we can start chatting about her life and work, we get a little tour of the ground floor apartment, complete with backyard and garden shed. On the living room walls some recently bought Athos Burez photographs grab our attention. Burez is also responsible for posters and campaign images of Velissarious plays. "I often find photoshoots very uncomfortable, but not with Athos. With him, you are building a world, often in one day, and live in his fairy tale. You play, as children would. "

Where did the need for theatre begin?

Acting or making?

Which came first?

At first I really wanted to be an actor. Even though I was not the kind of kid that really enjoyed putting on shows. I was just very interested in languages and spoken word. My parents sent me to evening school for diction and performance, a very Flemish thing to do if your child is good with words and languages. After high school I auditioned for Dora van der Groen right away. I became very insecure at that school. I didn’t make the second year in one go and had the chance to do it again, but I was afraid. My classmates were very talented and I really looked up to them. I thought: if I have to retake this year I am going to feel so stupid, and maybe grow too afraid of acting. So I started university, with the idea of taking a sabbatical year. One year turned into five years and eventually I earned my masters degree in theater and film studies. During the last year at university I realised I really wanted to act instead of getting a Ph.D. Otherwise I would never leave my desk and I have too many impulses to do so. So I went to the Academy of Performing Arts in Maastricht.

Those years at university became more then just a means to pass time, right?

Yes, I definitely got interested in the studies, but it took quite some time. In the beginning I was just delighted to be one of two hundred students in an auditorium. It was a very sobering experience after the very personal focus in a class of seven at the academy. I grew up in a very protective and loving environment in Limburg. After a Catholic all girl school with uniforms I went to a pretty rough theatre school in the centre of Antwerp. I was too young for that to be honest. It was too intense for me at the time. At the university your individuality doesn’t matter as much. If you want to get good grades, you just have to work hard. But only at the end of my masters did I aspire to an academic career. Even though it is not the path I chose, those years at uni… I wouldn't have missed it for the world. I learned so much there and gained a lot of life experience. Those were the wildest years of my life (laughs).

You wanted to be an actress, but now you are also a theatre maker.

Yes, I am, but I never really aspired to actually becoming a maker or a director. It turned out to be a natural combination. I switched so many times and in the end I graduated as an actor and as a dramaturge. In between the theory, the content of what you want to tell and the actual embodiment of it, lies the creation of theatre for me.

How do you determine the position you take, as an actor or director?

In the past few years I mostly directed and acted in my own productions. I did shoot for films or television. Next season, for the first time in a while, I am acting in someone else’s play, as Ophelia in Hamlet by Abattoir Fermé. In my own work it is less obvious what position I will take during the creative process. The first question always is: ‘Am I on stage or not?’. It determines the whole further process. The past five years I experimented with different models and there are pro’s and cons for each one.

A solo is the most distinct way of working. I am alone on stage and acting and creation are automatically one. In my last production, Sontag, it was also very clear that I was directing, not acting. By distancing myself as an actress, the whole creative process could take place outside myself. That way I had more control.

I found that directing, creating and acting at the same time is not ideal for me. Occasional collective work, for me, is neither fish nor fowl. On stage, in rehearsal, I am not entirely free, because I always have to keep an eye on the bigger picture. I am not really present with my fellow players, and I am constantly absent from my artistic team because I am on stage rehearsing. Making and acting at the same time is a duel between keeping distance and surrender. The distance you have to keep to control the course of the play and the complete surrender you need to forget in order to act on stage.

I am convinced art is a priori political.  Because an artist forces themselves to constantly think out loud.

How does your creative process begin?

It depends on what you mean by ‘begin’. Most of the time it is something that I’ve read or seen that made me excited. What happens next depends for a great deal on how much time and money you have to actually make a production. Right now, for instance, I am doing research for a play for next year. It is going to be a concert play, based on the work of Sarah Kane. Her work has become kind of a cliché, as a psycho-dramatic-erratic-womens theater. For me Kane’s writings are the perfect song lyrics. So I’ve been in the studio for two months already, with different musicians and producers, making ten tracks that will be the core of the play. When those tracks are finished it will become clearer what the course of the play will be. But in the meantime the premiere date is already set and the first promotional text is out the door.

Conceptualising, doing research, rehearsals, it is a gradual experience. It is a constant metamorphosis: from the first idea until the last performance. I never really know when the process begins or ends. But most of the time it starts with words, writing, and only then does it get thematic. I never see something of topical interest that makes me want to make a play about it. Journalistic theatre should not become the norm; I explicitly try to take a stand on that. Art needs to be relevant, but that is not the same as being topical. For instance, I think the self hate and suicide of Sara Kane is very relevant. But I do not feel the need to do sociological research on the current suicide rates of women in Europe.

Doesn’t politics automatically enter the work?

I am convinced art is a priori political. Because artists force themselves to constantly think out loud. The choice of expressing your thoughts is, a priori, a political choice. That’s also what scares me the most the night before a première, that I am going to share my thoughts on something with the world. It feels like one of the most vain things you can do: have people pay to watch you and listen to your thoughts. You have to take yourself quite seriously to assume that whatever you have to say can somehow be of added value for someone else’s life. However, if you don’t think that, you should not be making art. It is even more vain to let people pay to see your work if you don’t believe it is worth its while. No false modesty, but you should be able to put it all in perspective. It is a difficult balance.

That balance reminds me of the struggle the characters go through in Sontag.

Sontag indeed very much explored on that idea. Susan Sontag did not want to die, because she had the feeling she had much more to share with the world. You must have a fairly big ego to think something like that. On the other hand, she was ashamed for all her ideas that were accepted as a truth. Her essays frequently became successes by the time Sontag herself thought of them as out-dated because her philosophy was strongly related to the present and her own life. As an artist you experience that as well. You make about eighty per cent of the artistic choices because you are very tired that day, you just broke up with your boyfriend, or you drank too much coffee that morning. According to Sontag art is not good because all the separate components are well-considered choices, but because the entirety of the work has one drive, one that you cannot ignore.

How do you experience something losing its truth after its creation in theatre, a medium that is fleeting and at the same time can cover a tour of several months?

Sometimes I can experience that feeling… Especially with older work. One of my works A tragedy (simplified), had the opposite: it was endowed with more meaning after it premiered. It was a struggle to make and when it first premiered, not a big hit. Nevertheless it always returned, because the subject matters could be seen in a particular context: a Flemish girl of Greek decent, the immigrant story, Genk as an industrial city. I understand why it was revived. But it is a piece of work that I am a bit ashamed of, because the political message people wanted to see in that still hunts me. At the same time, I am proud of what I created.

Acting in your own play is one of the most embarrassing things to me. If you create it and act in it, you are responsible for everything. Up to and including the lights you stand in. There is nothing you can hide behind. It is my body, my story. If you don’t like it, it does sort of feel like you don’t like me. However, if people do like it, it feels like it’s your birthday everyday.

Theatre is not a talkshow. For me it is the medium of fictional relevance.

Your earlier work, A Tragedy (simplified) and Mr. Jones, seems to be much more direct personal stories. A play like Sontag seems to be more distant.

A tragedy was about my family, yes, but I played Electra. I turned myself into a character to make my story more universal. So it would be more open or recognisable for the audience. Because of the so-called political dimension everyone wanted to see in it, my story got a lot of attention in the media. Unfortunately, that is all that remains now. Mr. Jones dealt with my idea of love and my relationship, and I was on stage with my actual ex. But nobody knew that, so it wasn’t an issue. Those are the works you have to make first, about origin and love. But after A tragedy, I really had to fight hard for my work not to be labelled as personal-documentary-immigrant theatre. That is not my kind of theatre.

A Tragedy was an attempt to apply Aristotle’s poetics onto my own life. Mr. Jones was an adaptation of Cocteau’s Le Bel Indifférent and attempted a dramatic rendition of my own suffering. Every concept contains something that is at once personal and distant. To me, there is no rift between those earlier works and the rest. My work just naturally continues. Sontag was very personal to me. But some people missed ‘me’ because they did not see me on stage. With Sontag I could actually really share what I wanted to say. Thanks to that so-called distance from myself, because of the themes, as well as the fact that I did not act in it.

Your bookcase sure looks a lot like the one on stage in Sontag.

Yes, Sontag also always had her picture taken in front of her bookcase in her own home (laughs). There is even a special Sontag corner in my bookcase. I have read almost all of her work now. She is an inexhaustible source to me.

Sontag, Sartre, those are all quite intellectual sources for your theatre.

Yes, I guess so, but then again, who cares (laughs). But I do not want to make it elitist. I think a work of art is best when it works on many different levels. I always try to make sure one can enjoy my work without any knowledge of all the underlying philosophies. With Sontag I sometimes got the feeling people came to get a summary of Susan Sontag, a speed course in her philosophy. It was nice, but I did not expect it. Sometimes it felt like they came to see my show as an extra to the additional programme the theatres organised. People like to have a useful evening and like to think they learned something. This behaviour is also somewhat the side effect of the explicit politically engaged theatre popularity. The audience wants to see what they saw on the news, or what they read in the paper, translated into a personal, fun, manageable story That is not the essence of theatre. Theatre is not a talkshow. For me it is the medium of fictional relevance.

To me theatre is a place where pain is allowed to exist; you are allowed to feel pain and to look at it. I think that is something really valuable.

What is the purpose of theater then? Solely art?

Theater can be whatever, but it has no direct purpose. Theatre can tell us something about the human condition. I realise that sounds very cliché. For me, theatre is a way of life, of survival, but that probably sounds romantic or heavy too. To me theatre is a place where pain is allowed to exist; you are allowed to feel pain and to look at it. I think that is something really valuable. It is different from a theatre of solace. Put bluntly, I can relate myself to the world in two ways: either a sober, scientific way, or in a melodramatic, personal way (laughs). Theatre lies somewhere in the middle.

I do not want to make frumpy, bourgeois plays, but uncompromising work next to having a loving life with friends and family. That’s a huge prerogative if you ask me.

Do you need an environment that is direct and straightforward?

I do need an environment in which I can switch off my cynicism and hyper-awareness. Although it can sometimes be a virtue, most of the time it’s actually works numbing. Right now, for instance, I see myself talking about that hyper-awareness. I should’t  go “meta” all the time, let alone talking meta about meta like I’m doing now, or there’s no end to it.  (laughs). Then I will literally have no idea what I am doing. I find it one of the most striking things of this time: all those narrative constructs we grow up with, that makes us so aware of everything. I could just cry thinking about it because it doesn’t solve any of all that self-awareness. If you are sad, you are sad.

Do you feel the need to retreat?

My job entails being around people, all of the time. Every three months you start a project with new people and every time you establish these intense connections. Therefore I more and more do feel a need for peace and quiet. If you’re rehearsing or when you’re on tour, you end up at the bar almost every night. So, on my nights off, I like to be at home with my boyfriend. Sometimes it can feel a bit isolated, because after a while it is hard to separate your friends from your colleagues. Now I have to learn to surround myself with people on those days off as well. Really invest in my social life, host spontaneous barbecues and attend birthday parties.

I do not strive for something specific. I just have to create theatre. That is my ambition.

What  are your hopes for the future?

I would like to find a balance in work and private life. After graduating you fear you won’t get any work, or if you do find a job, you fear it is not enough to provide for yourself. If you find out that you actually can, then you can afford to only take on interesting work. Now I just hope to continue what I have done for the past years, to create pieces I really want to create. That is truly fantastic. But the past five years it has been at the expense of everything else. I hope to have a real home and family life aside from work. Without having to make great artistic sacrifices. I do not want to make frumpy, bourgeois plays, but uncompromising work next to having a loving life with friends and family. That’s a huge prerogative if you ask me.

What are you artistic ambitions?

To be strict with myself, not making any compromises. As an actress, I do not want to take on a role just because it is glamorous. I only want to do parts in which I can stay true to my own poetics. Sometimes I wonder if I don’t have enough ambition as a theatre maker. I do not strive for something specific. I just have to create theatre. That is my ambition. I hope that when I am sixty-five, I’ll still be lying in my bed trembling and vomiting when I have a premiere the next day, because I don’t know if my ideas are worth an entry ticket. Hopefully people will be convinced it is indeed worth it. Maybe that is my artistic ambition: to make myself go through all of that, over and over. That’s enough challenge for a lifetime.

Interview & translation: Lynn Elshof

English editor: Hendrik Wittock

Photographer: Tom Peeters