RE:RITE
TOUCHING ON DAILY RITUALS
Cyclical times
Theatre seasons are not usually aligned with the astronomical seasons. But this Kaaitheater season is an exception: we are being swept along on cyclical tides, from one season to the next. We will re-open at dawn on 21/09, when Brussels’ spiritual urban community The Monastery is coming to the Kaaistudios. To mark the beginning of the winter, around 21/12, we are inviting artists who explore sleep, those brief periods of time when we don’t need to be productive. Spring will start with a contemporary, danced version of Le Sacre du printemps, and we will head to a public swimming pool in the Marollen for a personal session at La Piscine about the (re)discovery of our bodies, which is so much more than rationality. At the beginning of the summer, we will take the plunge from individual to collective change in Lucinda Ra’s Groundwork.
Transformation
We are taking time to revisit one of the basic principles of the theatre: the ritual. We are going back to the original meaning of rituals – a temporary transformation in the theatre or a permanent transformation in the rites of passage – and will look beyond what they have all too often become, namely a sequence of coded movements or meaningless formal remnants. Traditional rituals have lost much of their power in Western society. And yet, there is a great need for ritualized moments, and especially for those that transcend the sacred rites that are often only associated with one religious tradition.
From opposition to relation
But what might these new rituals be in our current, ‘fluid’ times in which everything has become more fleeting and transient? In our almost completely desecularized and pluralist society, grand rituals appear to have been replaced by the small, the concrete, the authentic, and the everyday. This season, we are providing tools and writing scores for new, contemporary rituals. To this end, we will explore seven major and minor transitional moments: from being awake to falling asleep, from distance to nearness, from life to death, from West to East, from the individual to the collective, from health to sickness and from one season to the other.
RE:RITE is a series of rituals, productions, lectures, debates, and workshops that form a leitmotif throughout this season’s programme.
