Our times

Profundity vs. superficiality

What role is allotted to thinking in our time? Every day, we are inundated with images and fragments of text. Absorbing all this information is a time-consuming business and reduces our thinking to storage and processing. In this storm of impressions, Michiel Vandevelde pauses to think about the state of thinking.

Our times takes as its starting point a discussion between the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and the curator Daniel Tyradillis, as well as dance material from popular video clips. With this contrasting material, three dancers seek out the conflict between profundity and superficiality. This not only serves as a critique of our time, but is also an attempt to create new ways of thinking. In an exuberant choreography with reappropriated dance, fragments of text and bizarre music, Vandevelde creates space and time that go beyond the imagination.

• Michiel Vandevelde graduated from PARTS, but his activities are not limited to dance. He works as a curator and is linked to the performing arts magazine Etcetera as a co-editor-in-chief. He is artist-in-residence at Kaaitheater and opened our previous season with the stunning piece Antithesis, the future of the image.

Thinking does not play well in an image-based culture. There is not much to see in it. It is not a performing art.
– Neil Postman, Amusing ourselves to death