Meyoucycle sounds like ‘musical’ pronounced in a strange accent. Along with composer Chris Peck and four Ictus musicians, Bauer blends together all the ingredients for a musical, producing a completely new, hybrid genre. The piece is about you and me and everything in between. That’s right, a me-you cycle.
Five dancers and five musicians perform a polyphonic piece about death and saying goodbye. Nevertheless, there is also space for lightness. From the moment you are born, death is constantly approaching: life in freefall. By acknowledging death, Croizé and Guilloteau aim to celebrate life to the full.
Exactly one hundred years after the October Revolution in Russia, Eric Sleichim and BL!NDMAN [strings] are presenting a new sound score to the legendary film Arsenal by director Alexander Dovzhenko. Along with Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, Arsenal is rightly considered to be one of the revolutionary masterpieces of Soviet cinema.
Jan Decorte is leaving the classics behind, but not the great truths and mysteries that they contain. In Jan Paternoster and Dries Van Dijck of Black Box Revelation – and all the uncompromising vehemence that they bring to the piece – Decorte and Sigrid Vinks have found their ideal musical partners in crime. The gentlemen created a brand-new soundtrack especially for Stand Down.
Along with unpractised singers, Myriam Van Imschoot and Willem de Wolf are exploring the rehearsal process of a choral production. The misses, repetitions and mistakes that occur in the process form the performance material of this production. Because people are at their most vulnerable when they can’t (yet) do what they most desire.
Can light be a compositional building block? The Liquid Room Series radically questions the classical concert model. The audience is free to move around among the various stages set up in the dismantled hall of the Kaaitheater. Immerse yourself in a pure experience of sound and light!
In their performances, author and artist Romy Rüegger and electronic music performer Deena Abdelwahed reflect on ways of personal entanglement with the world and its politics, including the interpretation of history as part of the present.
Maarten Seghers looks for a confrontation with the artists, musicians and dancers Fritz Welch, Simon Lenski, Nicolas Field and Mohamed Toukabri, for whom he wrote an invocatory song about the noisiness of comforting.
Charlemagne Palestine is unleashing his strumming technique on the Bösendorfer Imperial: a piano that covers eight complete octaves. His instrument looks like a sculpted altar made of cuddly toys. He elevates these to divine creatures or shamanistic totems that are always close by.
What would hell look like today? The 500th anniversary of the death of Hieronymus Bosch, made Vasco Mendonça, Kris Verdonck and Dimitri Verhulst think. They quickly arrived at the beaches of Lampedusa: a place where while tourists were sunbathing refugees were washed up on the beach. The false paradise of the resorts and the Boschian hell on earth seamlessly flow into each other.
Marc Vanrunxt creates a dance performance based on the work of the solitary Lucien Goethals, pioneer of Flemish electronic music. The result acts as a journey through time, towards what in the 1970s was still the music of the future, and which quite possibly still sounds like that now.
This brand new production directed by Ivo Van Hove is based on Leoš Janácek’s song cycle that goes by the same name. The result of Janácek’s inspired efforts is a mysterious, deeply emotional and psychological piece on identity, alienation, and an impossible love. Annelies Van Parys – one of the most acclaimed Belgian composers of our time – adds a fi tting contemporary reply.
Dancer and choreographer Fumiyo Ikeda takes you on a journey to the heart of Morton Feldman’s Piano and String Quartet. This 80-minute composition for piano and strings exudes an aura of tranquillity, in which ‘each is just as much an echo of the other’. Ikeda shares the stage with the soloists of Ictus, as though she herself were the sixth musician.
Inspired by the hymn Say No!, more than 30 choirs and ensembles from across the world have created their own song about conscientious objection and desertion. All the contributed images and sounds form the material for a video creation, intertwined with a live performance by a huge international choir.
Stef Kamil Carlens was inspired by folk art, rituals, beautiful creatures from European folklore traditions, and early twentiethcentury modern art. Enter into this wonderful world of dance, music, word, costumes, and masks!
