Salon: Death, Mourning, Rituals & Performativity

Enjoy compelling conversations with performing artists, curators and academics in a relaxed atmosphere. More names will be added to the salons, keep an eye on the website!

One of the Performatik19 threads is death, loss and performativity. In March we will commemorate the 2016 attacks on Brussels. During U-Loss, Barbara Raes will develop new rituals around loss, together with six artists with very different cultural backgrounds. Pieter Van Bogaert thinks and talks about the beauty of the end. Lotte van den Berg will explore the borders between performance, therapy and politics, while IN/FINITY looks at the inter-section between care and art. This dicussion is moderated by Katleen Van Langendonck.

• The work of theatre director Lotte van den Berg (1975, Groningen) investigates the ways in which we relate to each other. She blurs the boundary between the performers and the audience, such as in her earlier work Building Conversation, which she presented during Performatik17.

• Barbara Raes worked as a dance curator and artistic director for Vooruit and BUDA between 2000 and 2014. In 2016, she founded Beyond the Spoken, a working space that deals with unacknowledged loss. Raes links her research and her work to the field of art, in venues such as DasArts, BOZAR, Theater Aan Zee, HAU Hebbel am Ufer and Kaaitheater.

• Pieter van Bogaert writes about art and occasionally presents exhibitions. He recently published Grand Tour 2020. Meetings across Europe on art and ecology to celebrate the tenth birthday of Imagine 2020, a European project about art and ecology of which Kaaitheater is the project leader. He lives and works in Brussels.

• Michel Yang is an American born, Brussels-based performance artist. Michel’s primary medium is the body, however, video and photography have recently begun to enter her work as extensions of her body practice. She received a Master of Fine Arts in Dance at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and has followed post-graduate studies with a.pass and Sound Image Culture.

• Katleen Van Langendonck (1971) studied Germanic Philology (General Literature ) and an additional year of philosophy in Leuven and Paris. She was responsible for the performing arts programming at deSingel international arts centre in Antwerp from 1997 to 2002. From 2002 to 2007 she has been a member of the academic staff at Antwerp University. Since 2007 Van Langendonck is responsible for the artistic programme of Kaaitheater, together with Guy Gypens. She has, amongst other projects, initiated Performatik, a collaboration with other Brussels institutions from the visual as well as the performance arts field.