While We Are Here

Raving is timeless: people have always danced intensely as a collective. Lisa Vereertbrugghen investigates exactly that timeless desire to dance hard together. She invited Claire Godsmark, Dolores Hulan, Eimi Legget, and Castélie Yalombo Lilonge for a parallel practice of hardcore rave and folk dance. Without nostalgia or a fixed vision of the future, they bring together a hybrid techno-folk that disrupts all control and celebrates collective physicality.  

When dancing hardcore, I don't practice hardness. For me, 'going hardcore' is going towards virtual touch, opening up the body to be moved intensely. It shows how machines—sound machines in this case—are able to make bodies feel more.³ Distorted bass pierces the gut and synths caress the upper skin layers through an interplay of technology and body, a posthuman kinship that is deliberately not productive. Hardcore heightens the ability to affect and be affected; it grinds the body softly. I propose that hardcore techno is therefore softcore, softcore dance, softcore choreography. My hardcore body is not hard and isolated, but sensual and in a constant affective encounter with every other body in space.  – from Some notes on Hardcore, a long-term study by Lisa Vereertbrugghen on hardcore techno since 2013 

• Brussels-based Lisa Vereertbrugghen (1986) is a dancer, choreographer, and researcher. She has been researching hardcore techno dance styles in various forms since 2014: performances, lecture-performances, performance installations, and publications. She holds a master's degree in cultural studies from KU Leuven and studied choreography at the School voor Nieuwe Dansontwikkeling (SNDO, School for New Dance Development) in Amsterdam. She often collaborates with Michael Langeder, Sophie Guisset, Vera Martins, and Madison Bycroft, and also works as a dramaturge, performer, and choreographer for various performance and visual artists between Brussels, Berlin, and Amsterdam. She also teaches at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. Her most recent performances were Softcore, a hardcore encounter (2018) and DISQUIET – sensational aesthetics of a technokin (2021).