End of Studies B

Twenty-two students from 14 countries are coming to the end of their four-year course at PARTS, the Brussels dance school headed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. They round off their studies with different programmes.

A group of eleven students has opted for its own artistic project. In the course of three months they have been working on 2 trios, 1 duet and 3 solos. The students themselves are responsible for both the form and content of their creation.

Trans-lation
choreography and performance: Tiran Willemse | coaching: Thomas Ryckewaert

Trans - across, beyond, crossing, on the other side: transoceanic, trans-Siberian, transatlantic.
Lation - object from one place into another.

The work explores a closer look into the very direct, flamboyant and stereotype lifestyle exposed by Jennie Livingston’s documentary ‘Paris is burning’. A power play between the real and fake image: just how real something fake can really be and how fake something real can be, the physical and physiological extreme we go through to achieve the perfect image of ourselves. We live in a very open-minded society where we see very strange things in our everyday, and I ask the question if we should embrace it or if we should be against it... This solo focuses on how we fail to allow the outsider to exist in his differentness.
A collage of pop music, my sense of humor and different icons which initially appear to be unrelated, but somehow intertwine very much with each other.

Chatter, Clatter and Other Arrangements
choreography and performance: Rósa Ómarsdottir, Christoffer Schieche, Hagar Tenenbaum | coaching: Bojana Cvejić, Chrysa Parkinson, Manon Santkin

"Things that you do when you do things that you do when things that you do do things that when you do things you do the things that you do to the things that one does things to"

Chatter, Clatter and Other Arrangements is a solo for three and 74 objects, where the objects organise themselves around bodies and the bodies organise themselves around objects. It could all be waste from the junk yard, someone’s belongings left behind, things from your cupboard, from your slaughtered brother or things that we stole. The stage becomes a drifting space where the bodies and the objects push each other into different forms and constellations, and where they constantly need to adapt to new relations. Fragmented as well as together, these body-objects and object-bodies move to infiltrate each other and present themselves as scenarios of theatre and sculpture.
How does this random collection of objects become specific, how can these fragments of movements/objects/bodies stumble upon each other and create moments of seeming wholeness? ‘Scheme Arrangements’ moves between banalities and meaning, between stable bodies and restless ones, through a space of different images.

MULTIVERSE (beta) 
design, construction, and performance: James McGinn | musical Sources: Louis Armstrong & Ella Fitzgerald, The Everly Brothers, Bobby Darin, The Mamas & The Papas, The Lovin' Spoonful, The Monkees, Aerosmith, Fleetwood Mac, Eurythmics, The Cranberries, Beyoncé | mentor: Jan Ritsema

Multiverse, or multiple (uni)verses, is a performance work that uses layers of complimentary/contrasting sound and image to create a space of woven potentialities. Each verse has been constructed as a collection/mosaic of fragmented references to be perceived (un/sub/supra)consciously. They fit together like gears in a clock to reveal a larger understanding that is dependent upon the associations of each observer. But this is just the beginning. Each parallel world-line, or trajectory of observation, weave together to build a multiverse that is independent of the ‘spectacle’. Together, the two multiverses reach toward an autonomous other to question the nature of performative reality. But in the end, it's merely an organic human's attempt at an amoebic transhumanist manifesto.

"Let me take you on a trip. Of fantasy and wonder. To the depths of known consciousness and beyond. To a space where anything is possible and the artificial nature of existence gives way to the MULTIVERSE. xo JM"