dance

On a stage covered with a thick layer of earth and bathed in light stand fourteen dancers – all different in age and dance background. Movements flow from one body to the next, gradually building to a wild climax. The result is a tactile experience that shares loneliness with fiction: how is it that you can be alone even when you’re in a group?

Across the span of a decade and a half, Boyzie Cekwana and Danya Hammoud have kept a nodding acknowledgement of each other’s trajectories and strategies for survival. Now they come together so they can stand, one next to the other, one on top of the other, turning, bending and entangling around each other. 'We come together so we can both reach down to the top of our boots and take out our bootlegged goods, our smuggled stories.'

Water Will (in Melody) is a devised choreographic work for four performers that uses melodrama as a point of departure. Wrestling with language and notions of ‘the will’, this dystopian fantasy becomes a space for negotiating desire, imagination, and feelings of an encroaching end.

Three performers spend three quarters of an hour turning around their own axis – a movement that in Sufi ceremonies is thought to lead to religious euphoria. In Miet Warlop’s version, it becomes an experiment on the fine line between maintaining and losing control. It is a combination of swirling dance, recital and concert. How can you find a balance between self-control and devotion?

Michiel Vandevelde goes in search of traces of the legacy of May ’68, along with a new generation of young people. Will they open new perspectives on the future when they research half a century of history in a wild choreography of iconic images?