KUNSTENFESTIVALDESARTS 08 - The performance is a radio show for soldiers at the front. Twelve contemporary pop songs are alternated with light comments in ‘chewing gum English’. Wölfl’s dancers move cautiously and cold-bloodedly, whether they are playing an electric guitar on tiptoes or elegantly draping a leg over a synthesiser.

This new dance performance opens at The Kitchen in New York and a week later will be on at the Studios. The title of this performance is a pictogram. It tells us that we are departing, that we have quit a place, a situation. The way one reads this sign in daily life is in transit, on the road. One perceives it for but a few moments.

The Swedish artist and composer Carl Michael von Hausswolff, who participated in Documenta in 1997, has written and staged a play about six ‘classic’ methods of torture that use water, light, sound, heat, etc. In Death is Certain, the Berlin performance artist Eva Meyer-Keller is a perfidious kitchen queen who puts vegetables to death. They are throttled, shot, drowned, poisoned and so on.

The Porcelain Project, Grace Ellen Barkey’s new creation, is based on a fascination with the fragility and transparency of porcelain and shows us a world in which dancers and porcelain move together. The setting for the performance is composed of hundreds of porcelain objects created by Lot Lemm. Grace Ellen Barkey brings them to life, together with the dancers, in an erotic world.

In recent years, Abattoir Fermé has become one of  Flanders’ leading companies. In Moe maar op en dolend the spectator is locked into a small anteroom of the subconscious where there is no logic and dreams turn into dark nightmares. De Morgen newspaper described it as ‘Twin Peaks served neat’.