Agenda

Filter by artist

Can the money we all use on a daily basis, be held responsible for the disastrous state the world is in today? In other words, if it is true that “money rules the world”, are we then not entitled to make it accountable for what has happened to the world under its governance? Trials of Money approaches this somewhat candid statement with the seriousness of a court of justice.

Based on interviews made with different bankers, lawyers, persons in extreme precarity, psychotherapists, economists, philanthropists, debt relief workers, representatives of indigenous nations, or monetary activists, Christophe Meierhans delivers their testimonies by responding to any questions the audience might want to ask them. This piece is an invitation to collectively investigate what money actually is and what it does. It is an invitation to challenge the idea that money is only a means at the service of human intentions and to attempt...

The focus of Sons of Sissy is the universe of traditions, folk dances and folk music from which the Upper Austrian country lad Simon Mayer originates.

In an experimental manner, four performers and musicians make use of traditional alpine live music, various group dances and ritualised practices. Liberating them from conservativism and conventions, they establish an unseen fusion of artistic reinterpretations and temporary social attributions of meaning. Defying categorisation and pigeonholing, the Sons of Sissy do everything they can to live up to their name as they conduct themselves as part weird folk-music quartet, part experimentally playful ritual dance combo, using humour to radically...

What does it mean to be together? In Mazing, five dancers are set in motion by the audience, creating visible networks of action which emerge from simple social negotiations. This gently destabilizing performance both challenges and strengthens notions of community, re- affirming the power of touch in the digital age.

Today, the social is a performance, and performance is a social event: how can we use this to generate new models of positive sociality through performance? Enter Mazing to catch a glimpse of one possibility, based on the simple power of the dancing body, the factuality of movement and the fragility of contact....

SunBengSitting is a piece straddling yodeling, folk dance and contemporary dance, a trip to the past and a playful, humorous search for identity.

Austrian farm boy and performance artist Simon Mayer invites the audience to get to know his life, his contradictions and his indignation at having to submit to categories and conventions. Having grown up on a farm facing traditions, nature, youthful rebellion and a bucolic heavy metal band, Simon Mayer moved to Vienna in 1997, attended Vienna's State Opera's dance school, spent a season as an aspiring dancer in the corps de ballet and very unexpectedly landed in a world where the word farmer could be used as an insult. The move was equal...

The focus of Sons of Sissy is the universe of traditions, folk dances and folk music from which the Upper Austrian country lad Simon Mayer originates.

In an experimental manner, four performers and musicians make use of traditional alpine live music, various group dances and ritualised practices. Liberating them from conservativism and conventions, they establish an unseen fusion of artistic reinterpretations and temporary social attributions of meaning. Defying categorisation and pigeonholing, the Sons of Sissy do everything they can to live up to their name as they conduct themselves as part weird folk-music quartet, part experimentally playful ritual dance combo, using humour to radically...

Works of science fiction give us an insight into a future civilization by telling the adventures of one of its individual inhabitants. Some use for your broken clay pots, on the contrary, provides us with the code that rules the life of the society it imagines.

The future is apprehended the other way around: it is up to us to picture what the adventures of our individual lives would be like under a defined set of new conditions. Developed in collaboration with a team of experts from different Belgian universities, Some use for your broken clay pots is a theatre piece whose script is the constitutional text for a democratic state that does not yet exist....

Thomas Ryckewaert

Golem

CANCELLED DUE TO ILLNESS

According to Jewish legend, a golem is a figure made from dust or clay by a man of learning and brought to life by means of a ritual incantation. The golem was intended as an assistant to its human creator, as a companion or protector of the latter’s threatened community. But the experiment gets out of hand, and the creature turns against its creator.

TRAILER >

Ask any sculptor; to recast even the dullest object is to celebrate it. – Tom McCarthy, Satin Island This myth of artificial life underlies Thomas Ryckewaert's latest creation. It is a tale of ambition, creativity, power, creation, madness and destruction. It is a theme that touches upon the age-old fear of creating something that surpasses us: from the Bible via Frankenstein to the ghost of artificial intelligence. It is a story that raises the same question in every age: how deep can we dig? Using a silent cinematic visual language,...

Verein zur Aufhebung des Notwendigen is a dinner and it is about democracy. Not democracy as institutional engineering for mass organisation, but democracy as something we internalize, as individuals, at the level of our day to day existence. It is about democracy as the realisation of our individual and collective desires.

A meal brings people together, it is warm and convivial. Yet, food is also home to our most intimate convictions: existential, ethical, aesthetic, economic, social, ritual or religious. In other words, dinner is the perfect set for a political showdown. The kitchen will be our theatre of operations. For the duration of the performance, and in many ways, all those present in a theatre hall form a community. In our case, this temporary community is given the untranslatable name Verein zur Aufhebung des Notwendigen, the club, or association for...

In 2012, visual artist Karthik Pandian and choreographer Andros Zins-Browne visited the Atlas Film Studios in the desert of Ouarzazate, Morocco. There, in front of film sets from previous Hollywood productions, they hired a group of studio camels and tried to persuade them to dance. The result of this endeavor can be seen in their 2014 video Atlas/Inserts – a choreography that casts the camel both as a political animal and a technology of movement.

Now with Atlas Revisited, their latest collaboration, the artists look back at the project and beyond. In a performance using text, movement, and moving image, they question their own motivations and the consequences of their pursuit of an image of freedom. Drawing on new video material, shot at EMPAC in Troy, NY in front of a green screen with American camel-actors, they pose the question of whether Atlas/Inserts was actually a ruse. Was the coercion depicted actually the performance of high-priced American talent keyed into background...

According to Jewish legend, a golem is a figure made from dust or clay by a man of learning and brought to life by means of a ritual incantation. The golem was intended as an assistant to its human creator, as a companion or protector of the latter’s threatened community. But the experiment gets out of hand, and the creature turns against its creator.

TRAILER >

Ask any sculptor; to recast even the dullest object is to celebrate it. – Tom McCarthy, Satin Island This myth of artificial life underlies Thomas Ryckewaert's latest creation. It is a tale of ambition, creativity, power, creation, madness and destruction. It is a theme that touches upon the age-old fear of creating something that surpasses us: from the Bible via Frankenstein to the ghost of artificial intelligence. It is a story that raises the same question in every age: how deep can we dig? Using a silent cinematic visual language,...

Bernard Van Eeghem + Stefanie Claes

Omertà

Premiere

Look, Stefanie Claes and Bernard Van Eeghem speak with paint. At the far ends of their arms they are singing. Because everyone who stood in between them, has been long gone. Who still knows their names? Where are the roots of unknown angers hiding? Who interrogates the magma of the boiling lava swirling? Who spares the high viscosity? Who is made of wood? Who knows the distance? Who knows the resistance? Who who? That’s life. And it only lasts for a moment. Be there.

 

Works of science fiction give us an insight into a future civilization by telling the adventures of one of its individual inhabitants. Some use for your broken clay pots, on the contrary, provides us with the code that rules the life of the society it imagines.

The future is apprehended the other way around: it is up to us to picture what the adventures of our individual lives would be like under a defined set of new conditions. Developed in collaboration with a team of experts from different Belgian universities, Some use for your broken clay pots is a theatre piece whose script is the constitutional text for a democratic state that does not yet exist....

In 2012, visual artist Karthik Pandian and choreographer Andros Zins-Browne visited the Atlas Film Studios in the desert of Ouarzazate, Morocco. There, in front of film sets from previous Hollywood productions, they hired a group of studio camels and tried to persuade them to dance. The result of this endeavor can be seen in their 2014 video Atlas/Inserts – a choreography that casts the camel both as a political animal and a technology of movement.

Now with Atlas Revisited, their latest collaboration, the artists look back at the project and beyond. In a performance using text, movement, and moving image, they question their own motivations and the consequences of their pursuit of an image of freedom. Drawing on new video material, shot at EMPAC in Troy, NY in front of a green screen with American camel-actors, they pose the question of whether Atlas/Inserts was actually a ruse. Was the coercion depicted actually the performance of high-priced American talent keyed into background...

According to Jewish legend, a golem is a figure made from dust or clay by a man of learning and brought to life by means of a ritual incantation. The golem was intended as an assistant to its human creator, as a companion or protector of the latter’s threatened community. But the experiment gets out of hand, and the creature turns against its creator.

TRAILER >

Ask any sculptor; to recast even the dullest object is to celebrate it. – Tom McCarthy, Satin Island This myth of artificial life underlies Thomas Ryckewaert's latest creation. It is a tale of ambition, creativity, power, creation, madness and destruction. It is a theme that touches upon the age-old fear of creating something that surpasses us: from the Bible via Frankenstein to the ghost of artificial intelligence. It is a story that raises the same question in every age: how deep can we dig? Using a silent cinematic visual language,...

Spectacles is a research by Sara Manente starting from the distance between language and experience, specifically the experience of dance and performance.

Following the critical line that considers the overcapitalization of language as its transformation into an oppressive tool, the research aims to restore and emancipate the relation between language and dance from a point of view of performativity. What are the limits of language to talk about aesthetic experience? What do we talk about when we talk about dance? How do we talk about something we don't know how to talk about? Which language performs a choreography? How to move with(out) words? > Order a copy of the publication SPECTACLES...

Look, Stefanie Claes and Bernard Van Eeghem speak with paint. At the far ends of their arms they are singing. Because everyone who stood in between them, has been long gone. Who still knows their names? Where are the roots of unknown angers hiding? Who interrogates the magma of the boiling lava swirling? Who spares the high viscosity? Who is made of wood? Who knows the distance? Who knows the resistance? Who who? That’s life. And it only lasts for a moment. Be there.

 

Undertone is a choreography that focuses on the potentials of sensory perception of the audience. Stemming from the interest to challenge spectatorship and destabilize the convention of watching performance, Undertone invites the audience in a complete dark space to participate in an orchestration of fictional spaces. Hereby, the performance prioritizes mechanisms of perception other than vision by proposing an immersive experience of different kinds of stimuli.

In Undertone, the body of the audience members is considered in all its potentiality to sense and navigate within an environment composed of a large spectrum of sensory movements such as tastes, sounds, smells, temperature fluctuations, touches, and ephemeral scenographies. www.undertone2012.wordpress.com Statements on the making of the piece Undertone 1. To remove spectatorship and destabilizing known ways of “watching" performances. 2. To engage the audience and the performers as active members of a collective event. 3. To propose...

Verein zur Aufhebung des Notwendigen is a dinner and it is about democracy. Not democracy as institutional engineering for mass organisation, but democracy as something we internalize, as individuals, at the level of our day to day existence. It is about democracy as the realisation of our individual and collective desires.

A meal brings people together, it is warm and convivial. Yet, food is also home to our most intimate convictions: existential, ethical, aesthetic, economic, social, ritual or religious. In other words, dinner is the perfect set for a political showdown. The kitchen will be our theatre of operations. For the duration of the performance, and in many ways, all those present in a theatre hall form a community. In our case, this temporary community is given the untranslatable name Verein zur Aufhebung des Notwendigen, the club, or association for...

This is a dance of touch. The work exists in the active, tactile, engaged negotiation between performer and audience – in their tacit agreement and understanding. Arranged in an ellipse, the audience themselves form the bounds of the theatrical space. This is a journey that, by definition, performer and audience discover and create together.

After premiering the first version of The Palm of Your Hand 2015, we are now touring The Palm of Your Hand # 2 - a re-creation commissioned by the Human Body Project. This re-creation reimagines the piece by working with a group of blind and partially sighted people to help make the work communicate beyond sight....

Works of science fiction give us an insight into a future civilization by telling the adventures of one of its individual inhabitants. Some use for your broken clay pots, on the contrary, provides us with the code that rules the life of the society it imagines.

The future is apprehended the other way around: it is up to us to picture what the adventures of our individual lives would be like under a defined set of new conditions. Developed in collaboration with a team of experts from different Belgian universities, Some use for your broken clay pots is a theatre piece whose script is the constitutional text for a democratic state that does not yet exist....

In Voicing Pieces, one’s own voice is staged to become the protagonist. In the intimacy of an isolated sound booth, guided by a simple score, the audience becomes spectator of their own voice.

The act of speaking and simultaneously hearing one's own voice turns into a theatrical and choreographic experience, sculpted anew with each individual interpretation of the score. The voice becomes a place for action, a spectacle or a surprise. Isn't one's own voice always inauthentic and uncanny? Who is speaking, when one's own voice speaks? Rather than recognizing oneself in the stranger, Voicing Pieces is an invitation to recognize the stranger in oneself....

Verein zur Aufhebung des Notwendigen is a dinner and it is about democracy. Not democracy as institutional engineering for mass organisation, but democracy as something we internalize, as individuals, at the level of our day to day existence. It is about democracy as the realisation of our individual and collective desires.

A meal brings people together, it is warm and convivial. Yet, food is also home to our most intimate convictions: existential, ethical, aesthetic, economic, social, ritual or religious. In other words, dinner is the perfect set for a political showdown. The kitchen will be our theatre of operations. For the duration of the performance, and in many ways, all those present in a theatre hall form a community. In our case, this temporary community is given the untranslatable name Verein zur Aufhebung des Notwendigen, the club, or association for...

What does it mean to be together? In Mazing, five dancers are set in motion by the audience, creating visible networks of action which emerge from simple social negotiations. This gently destabilizing performance both challenges and strengthens notions of community, re- affirming the power of touch in the digital age.

Today, the social is a performance, and performance is a social event: how can we use this to generate new models of positive sociality through performance? Enter Mazing to catch a glimpse of one possibility, based on the simple power of the dancing body, the factuality of movement and the fragility of contact....

Works of science fiction give us an insight into a future civilization by telling the adventures of one of its individual inhabitants. Some use for your broken clay pots, on the contrary, provides us with the code that rules the life of the society it imagines.

The future is apprehended the other way around: it is up to us to picture what the adventures of our individual lives would be like under a defined set of new conditions. Developed in collaboration with a team of experts from different Belgian universities, Some use for your broken clay pots is a theatre piece whose script is the constitutional text for a democratic state that does not yet exist....

In As We Were Moving Ahead Occasionally We Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, Gaëtan Rusquet explores the choreographic potential of (live) video editing and the perspective of the selfie. In a never-ending tracking shot, the arm operates as a steadycam creating a hypnotic loop.

The continuous (re)staging of oneself pushes the limits of the inside and the outside of both the body and the stage. In this circular spatiality, the whereabouts of the performers are hard to determine. Their perpetual transit begs the question: How does it feel like to swallow or be swallowed by somebody, a community or technology?...

The focus of Sons of Sissy is the universe of traditions, folk dances and folk music from which the Upper Austrian country lad Simon Mayer originates.

In an experimental manner, four performers and musicians make use of traditional alpine live music, various group dances and ritualised practices. Liberating them from conservativism and conventions, they establish an unseen fusion of artistic reinterpretations and temporary social attributions of meaning. Defying categorisation and pigeonholing, the Sons of Sissy do everything they can to live up to their name as they conduct themselves as part weird folk-music quartet, part experimentally playful ritual dance combo, using humour to radically...

Works of science fiction give us an insight into a future civilization by telling the adventures of one of its individual inhabitants. Some use for your broken clay pots, on the contrary, provides us with the code that rules the life of the society it imagines.

The future is apprehended the other way around: it is up to us to picture what the adventures of our individual lives would be like under a defined set of new conditions. Developed in collaboration with a team of experts from different Belgian universities, Some use for your broken clay pots is a theatre piece whose script is the constitutional text for a democratic state that does not yet exist....

Bernard Van Eeghem is a theatre-maker, artist and writer. In Sanglier these activities are combined more than ever.
** nominated as ‘best performace’ for the “prix de la critique 2012” **

Van Eeghem tells anecdotes from his youth in Bruges. One day his father took him to the procession of the Holy Blood. It made an indelible impression. In this performance, Van Eeghem paints what he tells and tells what he paints. Ending up with himself and his earliest beginnings. ...

This durational performance is conceived as a public rehearsal, where choreographer Zins-Browne practices the remixing, overlapping, extending and warping of his own repertoire, attempting to ‘unmake’ a personal history of choreography.

Interwoven with jokes and stories on notions of speed and progress, Already Unmade reverses the order in which choreography is normally created. Zins-Browne begins with his own finished, 'choreographic objects' and subjects them to ensuing processes where they begin to unravel....

The focus of Sons of Sissy is the universe of traditions, folk dances and folk music from which the Upper Austrian country lad Simon Mayer originates.

In an experimental manner, four performers and musicians make use of traditional alpine live music, various group dances and ritualised practices. Liberating them from conservativism and conventions, they establish an unseen fusion of artistic reinterpretations and temporary social attributions of meaning. Defying categorisation and pigeonholing, the Sons of Sissy do everything they can to live up to their name as they conduct themselves as part weird folk-music quartet, part experimentally playful ritual dance combo, using humour to radically...

This durational performance is conceived as a public rehearsal, where choreographer Zins-Browne practices the remixing, overlapping, extending and warping of his own repertoire, attempting to ‘unmake’ a personal history of choreography.

Interwoven with jokes and stories on notions of speed and progress, Already Unmade reverses the order in which choreography is normally created. Zins-Browne begins with his own finished, 'choreographic objects' and subjects them to ensuing processes where they begin to unravel....

A site specific performance of a slowly mutating image high in the sky. A striking intervention in public space.

A long red dress, almost touching the ground, loosens tranquily small parts of itself until it fully disappears. It's a pompous image, but at the same time humble and modest. In it's offer of beauty it comforts us and distrupts us. Without noticing we are holding still, asking ourselves questions and color the image with our own narratives. In dialogue with Dolores Bouckaert Wings is custom made to each context. The performances lasts about 90 minutes and can be seen from far distance....

Simon Mayer / Kopf hoch

Oh Magic

Kunstenfestivaldesarts

premiere

Oh Magic wanders through the wonders of theatrical magic. It is that mysterious unnamable thing we sometimes have the chance to encounter in a piece. But, where does it come from and where does it take us? What fascinates us as a performer or as a spectator? Somewhere between freak and fascination, Simon Mayer and his performers seek for the answers both in technological manipulation and organic oracles.

Oh Magic is a live concert, played by robots and performers. Using musical instruments in an unconventional way they bring dance and performance, music and soundscapes, robotics and visual arts together on stage. Our futuristic fantasies take shape in today's technology, which never seizes to fascinate and –even if only a little— grab us by the troat. Our double relationship to robotics is prominently present in the universe of Oh Magic where performers and machines meet, with trembling voices and childlike curiosity. He finds his desire...

In Voicing Pieces, one’s own voice is staged to become the protagonist. In the intimacy of an isolated sound booth, guided by a simple score, the audience becomes spectator of their own voice.

The act of speaking and simultaneously hearing one's own voice turns into a theatrical and choreographic experience, sculpted anew with each individual interpretation of the score. The voice becomes a place for action, a spectacle or a surprise. Isn't one's own voice always inauthentic and uncanny? Who is speaking, when one's own voice speaks? Rather than recognizing oneself in the stranger, Voicing Pieces is an invitation to recognize the stranger in oneself....

Verein zur Aufhebung des Notwendigen is a dinner and it is about democracy. Not democracy as institutional engineering for mass organisation, but democracy as something we internalize, as individuals, at the level of our day to day existence. It is about democracy as the realisation of our individual and collective desires.

A meal brings people together, it is warm and convivial. Yet, food is also home to our most intimate convictions: existential, ethical, aesthetic, economic, social, ritual or religious. In other words, dinner is the perfect set for a political showdown. The kitchen will be our theatre of operations. For the duration of the performance, and in many ways, all those present in a theatre hall form a community. In our case, this temporary community is given the untranslatable name Verein zur Aufhebung des Notwendigen, the club, or association for...

Works of science fiction give us an insight into a future civilization by telling the adventures of one of its individual inhabitants. Some use for your broken clay pots, on the contrary, provides us with the code that rules the life of the society it imagines.

The future is apprehended the other way around: it is up to us to picture what the adventures of our individual lives would be like under a defined set of new conditions. Developed in collaboration with a team of experts from different Belgian universities, Some use for your broken clay pots is a theatre piece whose script is the constitutional text for a democratic state that does not yet exist....

Verein zur Aufhebung des Notwendigen is a dinner and it is about democracy. Not democracy as institutional engineering for mass organisation, but democracy as something we internalize, as individuals, at the level of our day to day existence. It is about democracy as the realisation of our individual and collective desires.

A meal brings people together, it is warm and convivial. Yet, food is also home to our most intimate convictions: existential, ethical, aesthetic, economic, social, ritual or religious. In other words, dinner is the perfect set for a political showdown. The kitchen will be our theatre of operations. For the duration of the performance, and in many ways, all those present in a theatre hall form a community. In our case, this temporary community is given the untranslatable name Verein zur Aufhebung des Notwendigen, the club, or association for...

Simon Mayer / Kopf hoch

SunBengSitting

Faro Festival Encontros de DeVIR

SunBengSitting is a piece straddling yodeling, folk dance and contemporary dance, a trip to the past and a playful, humorous search for identity.

Austrian farm boy and performance artist Simon Mayer invites the audience to get to know his life, his contradictions and his indignation at having to submit to categories and conventions. Having grown up on a farm facing traditions, nature, youthful rebellion and a bucolic heavy metal band, Simon Mayer moved to Vienna in 1997, attended Vienna's State Opera's dance school, spent a season as an aspiring dancer in the corps de ballet and very unexpectedly landed in a world where the word farmer could be used as an insult. The move was equal...

Look, Stefanie Claes and Bernard Van Eeghem speak with paint. At the far ends of their arms they are singing. Because everyone who stood in between them, has been long gone. Who still knows their names? Where are the roots of unknown angers hiding? Who interrogates the magma of the boiling lava swirling? Who spares the high viscosity? Who is made of wood? Who knows the distance? Who knows the resistance? Who who? That’s life. And it only lasts for a moment. Be there.

 

SunBengSitting is a piece straddling yodeling, folk dance and contemporary dance, a trip to the past and a playful, humorous search for identity.

Austrian farm boy and performance artist Simon Mayer invites the audience to get to know his life, his contradictions and his indignation at having to submit to categories and conventions. Having grown up on a farm facing traditions, nature, youthful rebellion and a bucolic heavy metal band, Simon Mayer moved to Vienna in 1997, attended Vienna's State Opera's dance school, spent a season as an aspiring dancer in the corps de ballet and very unexpectedly landed in a world where the word farmer could be used as an insult. The move was equal...

In 2012, visual artist Karthik Pandian and choreographer Andros Zins-Browne visited the Atlas Film Studios in the desert of Ouarzazate, Morocco. There, in front of film sets from previous Hollywood productions, they hired a group of studio camels and tried to persuade them to dance. The result of this endeavor can be seen in their 2014 video Atlas/Inserts – a choreography that casts the camel both as a political animal and a technology of movement.

Now with Atlas Revisited, their latest collaboration, the artists look back at the project and beyond. In a performance using text, movement, and moving image, they question their own motivations and the consequences of their pursuit of an image of freedom. Drawing on new video material, shot at EMPAC in Troy, NY in front of a green screen with American camel-actors, they pose the question of whether Atlas/Inserts was actually a ruse. Was the coercion depicted actually the performance of high-priced American talent keyed into background...

The focus of Sons of Sissy is the universe of traditions, folk dances and folk music from which the Upper Austrian country lad Simon Mayer originates.

In an experimental manner, four performers and musicians make use of traditional alpine live music, various group dances and ritualised practices. Liberating them from conservativism and conventions, they establish an unseen fusion of artistic reinterpretations and temporary social attributions of meaning. Defying categorisation and pigeonholing, the Sons of Sissy do everything they can to live up to their name as they conduct themselves as part weird folk-music quartet, part experimentally playful ritual dance combo, using humour to radically...

The focus of Sons of Sissy is the universe of traditions, folk dances and folk music from which the Upper Austrian country lad Simon Mayer originates.

In an experimental manner, four performers and musicians make use of traditional alpine live music, various group dances and ritualised practices. Liberating them from conservativism and conventions, they establish an unseen fusion of artistic reinterpretations and temporary social attributions of meaning. Defying categorisation and pigeonholing, the Sons of Sissy do everything they can to live up to their name as they conduct themselves as part weird folk-music quartet, part experimentally playful ritual dance combo, using humour to radically...

The focus of Sons of Sissy is the universe of traditions, folk dances and folk music from which the Upper Austrian country lad Simon Mayer originates.

In an experimental manner, four performers and musicians make use of traditional alpine live music, various group dances and ritualised practices. Liberating them from conservativism and conventions, they establish an unseen fusion of artistic reinterpretations and temporary social attributions of meaning. Defying categorisation and pigeonholing, the Sons of Sissy do everything they can to live up to their name as they conduct themselves as part weird folk-music quartet, part experimentally playful ritual dance combo, using humour to radically...

Works of science fiction give us an insight into a future civilization by telling the adventures of one of its individual inhabitants. Some use for your broken clay pots, on the contrary, provides us with the code that rules the life of the society it imagines.

The future is apprehended the other way around: it is up to us to picture what the adventures of our individual lives would be like under a defined set of new conditions. Developed in collaboration with a team of experts from different Belgian universities, Some use for your broken clay pots is a theatre piece whose script is the constitutional text for a democratic state that does not yet exist....

SunBengSitting is a piece straddling yodeling, folk dance and contemporary dance, a trip to the past and a playful, humorous search for identity.

Austrian farm boy and performance artist Simon Mayer invites the audience to get to know his life, his contradictions and his indignation at having to submit to categories and conventions. Having grown up on a farm facing traditions, nature, youthful rebellion and a bucolic heavy metal band, Simon Mayer moved to Vienna in 1997, attended Vienna's State Opera's dance school, spent a season as an aspiring dancer in the corps de ballet and very unexpectedly landed in a world where the word farmer could be used as an insult. The move was equal...

The focus of Sons of Sissy is the universe of traditions, folk dances and folk music from which the Upper Austrian country lad Simon Mayer originates.

In an experimental manner, four performers and musicians make use of traditional alpine live music, various group dances and ritualised practices. Liberating them from conservativism and conventions, they establish an unseen fusion of artistic reinterpretations and temporary social attributions of meaning. Defying categorisation and pigeonholing, the Sons of Sissy do everything they can to live up to their name as they conduct themselves as part weird folk-music quartet, part experimentally playful ritual dance combo, using humour to radically...

In As We Were Moving Ahead Occasionally We Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, Gaëtan Rusquet explores the choreographic potential of (live) video editing and the perspective of the selfie. In a never-ending tracking shot, the arm operates as a steadycam creating a hypnotic loop.

The continuous (re)staging of oneself pushes the limits of the inside and the outside of both the body and the stage. In this circular spatiality, the whereabouts of the performers are hard to determine. Their perpetual transit begs the question: How does it feel like to swallow or be swallowed by somebody, a community or technology?...

The focus of Sons of Sissy is the universe of traditions, folk dances and folk music from which the Upper Austrian country lad Simon Mayer originates.

In an experimental manner, four performers and musicians make use of traditional alpine live music, various group dances and ritualised practices. Liberating them from conservativism and conventions, they establish an unseen fusion of artistic reinterpretations and temporary social attributions of meaning. Defying categorisation and pigeonholing, the Sons of Sissy do everything they can to live up to their name as they conduct themselves as part weird folk-music quartet, part experimentally playful ritual dance combo, using humour to radically...

Gallop (Biography of a Body) tells the bizarre story of the life cycle of a body. It is a chronically ill body that has reached a turning point after forty years, and often seems to have a life of its own. Its service fails and resistance loses.

Dolores Bouckaert researches the complex and ambiguous relationship between her body and spirit, in which an irrepressible desire to move often conflicts with reality. Dolores Bouckaert's co-star in this solo is a fast and powerful horse. The two are one another's opposites until they become interchangeable, when the horse's gallop coincides with the rhythm of her heartbeat....

This is a dance of touch. The work exists in the active, tactile, engaged negotiation between performer and audience – in their tacit agreement and understanding. Arranged in an ellipse, the audience themselves form the bounds of the theatrical space. This is a journey that, by definition, performer and audience discover and create together.

After premiering the first version of The Palm of Your Hand 2015, we are now touring The Palm of Your Hand # 2 - a re-creation commissioned by the Human Body Project. This re-creation reimagines the piece by working with a group of blind and partially sighted people to help make the work communicate beyond sight....

SunBengSitting is a piece straddling yodeling, folk dance and contemporary dance, a trip to the past and a playful, humorous search for identity.

Austrian farm boy and performance artist Simon Mayer invites the audience to get to know his life, his contradictions and his indignation at having to submit to categories and conventions. Having grown up on a farm facing traditions, nature, youthful rebellion and a bucolic heavy metal band, Simon Mayer moved to Vienna in 1997, attended Vienna's State Opera's dance school, spent a season as an aspiring dancer in the corps de ballet and very unexpectedly landed in a world where the word farmer could be used as an insult. The move was equal...

SunBengSitting is a piece straddling yodeling, folk dance and contemporary dance, a trip to the past and a playful, humorous search for identity.

Austrian farm boy and performance artist Simon Mayer invites the audience to get to know his life, his contradictions and his indignation at having to submit to categories and conventions. Having grown up on a farm facing traditions, nature, youthful rebellion and a bucolic heavy metal band, Simon Mayer moved to Vienna in 1997, attended Vienna's State Opera's dance school, spent a season as an aspiring dancer in the corps de ballet and very unexpectedly landed in a world where the word farmer could be used as an insult. The move was equal...

Oh Magic wanders through the wonders of theatrical magic. It is that mysterious unnamable thing we sometimes have the chance to encounter in a piece. But, where does it come from and where does it take us? What fascinates us as a performer or as a spectator? Somewhere between freak and fascination, Simon Mayer and his performers seek for the answers both in technological manipulation and organic oracles.

Oh Magic is a live concert, played by robots and performers. Using musical instruments in an unconventional way they bring dance and performance, music and soundscapes, robotics and visual arts together on stage. Our futuristic fantasies take shape in today's technology, which never seizes to fascinate and –even if only a little— grab us by the troat. Our double relationship to robotics is prominently present in the universe of Oh Magic where performers and machines meet, with trembling voices and childlike curiosity. He finds his desire...

Can the money we all use on a daily basis, be held responsible for the disastrous state the world is in today? In other words, if it is true that “money rules the world”, are we then not entitled to make it accountable for what has happened to the world under its governance? Trials of Money approaches this somewhat candid statement with the seriousness of a court of justice.

Based on interviews made with different bankers, lawyers, persons in extreme precarity, psychotherapists, economists, philanthropists, debt relief workers, representatives of indigenous nations, or monetary activists, Christophe Meierhans delivers their testimonies by responding to any questions the audience might want to ask them. This piece is an invitation to collectively investigate what money actually is and what it does. It is an invitation to challenge the idea that money is only a means at the service of human intentions and to attempt...

The focus of Sons of Sissy is the universe of traditions, folk dances and folk music from which the Upper Austrian country lad Simon Mayer originates.

In an experimental manner, four performers and musicians make use of traditional alpine live music, various group dances and ritualised practices. Liberating them from conservativism and conventions, they establish an unseen fusion of artistic reinterpretations and temporary social attributions of meaning. Defying categorisation and pigeonholing, the Sons of Sissy do everything they can to live up to their name as they conduct themselves as part weird folk-music quartet, part experimentally playful ritual dance combo, using humour to radically...

The focus of Sons of Sissy is the universe of traditions, folk dances and folk music from which the Upper Austrian country lad Simon Mayer originates.

In an experimental manner, four performers and musicians make use of traditional alpine live music, various group dances and ritualised practices. Liberating them from conservativism and conventions, they establish an unseen fusion of artistic reinterpretations and temporary social attributions of meaning. Defying categorisation and pigeonholing, the Sons of Sissy do everything they can to live up to their name as they conduct themselves as part weird folk-music quartet, part experimentally playful ritual dance combo, using humour to radically...

In Voicing Pieces, one’s own voice is staged to become the protagonist. In the intimacy of an isolated sound booth, guided by a simple score, the audience becomes spectator of their own voice.

The act of speaking and simultaneously hearing one's own voice turns into a theatrical and choreographic experience, sculpted anew with each individual interpretation of the score. The voice becomes a place for action, a spectacle or a surprise. Isn't one's own voice always inauthentic and uncanny? Who is speaking, when one's own voice speaks? Rather than recognizing oneself in the stranger, Voicing Pieces is an invitation to recognize the stranger in oneself....

What does it mean to be together? In Mazing, five dancers are set in motion by the audience, creating visible networks of action which emerge from simple social negotiations. This gently destabilizing performance both challenges and strengthens notions of community, re- affirming the power of touch in the digital age.

Today, the social is a performance, and performance is a social event: how can we use this to generate new models of positive sociality through performance? Enter Mazing to catch a glimpse of one possibility, based on the simple power of the dancing body, the factuality of movement and the fragility of contact....

Vera Tussing + Esse Vanderbruggen

Both, Two

TRY-OUT

In Both, Two Tussing & Vanderbruggen examine the duet, the smallest unit of togetherness. The dance duet is a genre with a history. In their most familiar forms, duets reflect the range of possibilities for relating, which resonate within a certain cultural imaginary. In particular, they reveal common-sense attitudes towards who gets to move, how, and under what conditions.

When two people dance together, a whole constellation of invitations, permissions and prohibitions is put on display. Both, Two invites the spectator to jump into this complex more-than-human ecology with her whole body: the work asks us not just to see but to sense. Can we hear a duet? What does it feel like? Costumes with palpable textures, swirling currents of air and sound, and a tactile program note complement the movements of tangibly enfleshed bodies; a journey for the proximal senses that intersects with the visual and the aural in...

What does it mean to be together? In Mazing, five dancers are set in motion by the audience, creating visible networks of action which emerge from simple social negotiations. This gently destabilizing performance both challenges and strengthens notions of community, re- affirming the power of touch in the digital age.

Today, the social is a performance, and performance is a social event: how can we use this to generate new models of positive sociality through performance? Enter Mazing to catch a glimpse of one possibility, based on the simple power of the dancing body, the factuality of movement and the fragility of contact....

Oh Magic wanders through the wonders of theatrical magic. It is that mysterious unnamable thing we sometimes have the chance to encounter in a piece. But, where does it come from and where does it take us? What fascinates us as a performer or as a spectator? Somewhere between freak and fascination, Simon Mayer and his performers seek for the answers both in technological manipulation and organic oracles.

Oh Magic is a live concert, played by robots and performers. Using musical instruments in an unconventional way they bring dance and performance, music and soundscapes, robotics and visual arts together on stage. Our futuristic fantasies take shape in today's technology, which never seizes to fascinate and –even if only a little— grab us by the troat. Our double relationship to robotics is prominently present in the universe of Oh Magic where performers and machines meet, with trembling voices and childlike curiosity. He finds his desire...

Meanwhile, is a work about bodies, architectures, and disasters. The performers are evolving in a set that could be an architectural model or installation. Constantly, they have to deal with a destruction’s threat on what they build. By playing with scales, the body within the space ranges from power to helplessness.

The raw materality of the set, the physicality of the sound and the necessity of the movement turn this work into a contemplative and expanded time experience. Here or there, this is a journey in the history of a city....

In Voicing Pieces, one’s own voice is staged to become the protagonist. In the intimacy of an isolated sound booth, guided by a simple score, the audience becomes spectator of their own voice.

The act of speaking and simultaneously hearing one's own voice turns into a theatrical and choreographic experience, sculpted anew with each individual interpretation of the score. The voice becomes a place for action, a spectacle or a surprise. Isn't one's own voice always inauthentic and uncanny? Who is speaking, when one's own voice speaks? Rather than recognizing oneself in the stranger, Voicing Pieces is an invitation to recognize the stranger in oneself....

What does it mean to be together? In Mazing, five dancers are set in motion by the audience, creating visible networks of action which emerge from simple social negotiations. This gently destabilizing performance both challenges and strengthens notions of community, re- affirming the power of touch in the digital age.

Today, the social is a performance, and performance is a social event: how can we use this to generate new models of positive sociality through performance? Enter Mazing to catch a glimpse of one possibility, based on the simple power of the dancing body, the factuality of movement and the fragility of contact....

SunBengSitting is a piece straddling yodeling, folk dance and contemporary dance, a trip to the past and a playful, humorous search for identity.

Austrian farm boy and performance artist Simon Mayer invites the audience to get to know his life, his contradictions and his indignation at having to submit to categories and conventions. Having grown up on a farm facing traditions, nature, youthful rebellion and a bucolic heavy metal band, Simon Mayer moved to Vienna in 1997, attended Vienna's State Opera's dance school, spent a season as an aspiring dancer in the corps de ballet and very unexpectedly landed in a world where the word farmer could be used as an insult. The move was equal...

This durational performance is conceived as a public rehearsal, where choreographer Zins-Browne practices the remixing, overlapping, extending and warping of his own repertoire, attempting to ‘unmake’ a personal history of choreography.

Interwoven with jokes and stories on notions of speed and progress, Already Unmade reverses the order in which choreography is normally created. Zins-Browne begins with his own finished, 'choreographic objects' and subjects them to ensuing processes where they begin to unravel....

Spectacles is a research by Sara Manente starting from the distance between language and experience, specifically the experience of dance and performance.

Following the critical line that considers the overcapitalization of language as its transformation into an oppressive tool, the research aims to restore and emancipate the relation between language and dance from a point of view of performativity. What are the limits of language to talk about aesthetic experience? What do we talk about when we talk about dance? How do we talk about something we don't know how to talk about? Which language performs a choreography? How to move with(out) words? > Order a copy of the publication SPECTACLES...

What does nature say? To find out, Myriam Van Imschoot visited a zoo, used a tuning fork to listen to a motorway, discovered on walks in the woods birds that sound like chainsaws or can imitate the ringtones of mobile phones, saw crocodiles in Australia but couldn’t hear them…

Drawing on a variety of field recordings, five performers – coming from the noise underground scene to pop – replicate these various sounds, using only their voices. They give a sort of a cappella rendition of the planet's soundscapes and the buzz in the world. What Nature Says is a radiophonic performance, a show to listen to and watch, both recognizable and abstract, and in which notions about humanity, nature and machines are called into question. If you listen carefully, you will hear that not everything is running smoothly. Listen...

In Voicing Pieces, one’s own voice is staged to become the protagonist. In the intimacy of an isolated sound booth, guided by a simple score, the audience becomes spectator of their own voice.

The act of speaking and simultaneously hearing one's own voice turns into a theatrical and choreographic experience, sculpted anew with each individual interpretation of the score. The voice becomes a place for action, a spectacle or a surprise. Isn't one's own voice always inauthentic and uncanny? Who is speaking, when one's own voice speaks? Rather than recognizing oneself in the stranger, Voicing Pieces is an invitation to recognize the stranger in oneself....

Meanwhile, is a work about bodies, architectures, and disasters. The performers are evolving in a set that could be an architectural model or installation. Constantly, they have to deal with a destruction’s threat on what they build. By playing with scales, the body within the space ranges from power to helplessness.

The raw materality of the set, the physicality of the sound and the necessity of the movement turn this work into a contemplative and expanded time experience. Here or there, this is a journey in the history of a city....

Oh Magic wanders through the wonders of theatrical magic. It is that mysterious unnamable thing we sometimes have the chance to encounter in a piece. But, where does it come from and where does it take us? What fascinates us as a performer or as a spectator? Somewhere between freak and fascination, Simon Mayer and his performers seek for the answers both in technological manipulation and organic oracles.

Oh Magic is a live concert, played by robots and performers. Using musical instruments in an unconventional way they bring dance and performance, music and soundscapes, robotics and visual arts together on stage. Our futuristic fantasies take shape in today's technology, which never seizes to fascinate and –even if only a little— grab us by the troat. Our double relationship to robotics is prominently present in the universe of Oh Magic where performers and machines meet, with trembling voices and childlike curiosity. He finds his desire...

This is a dance of touch. The work exists in the active, tactile, engaged negotiation between performer and audience – in their tacit agreement and understanding. Arranged in an ellipse, the audience themselves form the bounds of the theatrical space. This is a journey that, by definition, performer and audience discover and create together.

After premiering the first version of The Palm of Your Hand 2015, we are now touring The Palm of Your Hand # 2 - a re-creation commissioned by the Human Body Project. This re-creation reimagines the piece by working with a group of blind and partially sighted people to help make the work communicate beyond sight....

Oh Magic wanders through the wonders of theatrical magic. It is that mysterious unnamable thing we sometimes have the chance to encounter in a piece. But, where does it come from and where does it take us? What fascinates us as a performer or as a spectator? Somewhere between freak and fascination, Simon Mayer and his performers seek for the answers both in technological manipulation and organic oracles.

Oh Magic is a live concert, played by robots and performers. Using musical instruments in an unconventional way they bring dance and performance, music and soundscapes, robotics and visual arts together on stage. Our futuristic fantasies take shape in today's technology, which never seizes to fascinate and –even if only a little— grab us by the troat. Our double relationship to robotics is prominently present in the universe of Oh Magic where performers and machines meet, with trembling voices and childlike curiosity. He finds his desire...
Bert Van Dijck

Tactile Quartet(s) is an interactive piece that builds on Vera Tussing’s previous explorations of dance, tactility, and the sensory engagement of the audience. Four musicians play the American Quartet by Dvořák, a piece written in the late 1800 and belonging to the romantic period in music history.

In Tactile Quartet(s), the string quartet switches between playing their instruments, and engaging in one-on-one tactile encounters with audience members creating a "physical play back". What we hear is music; what we see is choreography. What if we take the string quartet seriously as a dance – and dance along? Four dancers will mediate the encounter between musicality and tactility through a choreography oscillating between the felt, the seen, the heard and the aesthetic. The commands, movements, and communicative channels which animate...

The focus of Sons of Sissy is the universe of traditions, folk dances and folk music from which the Upper Austrian country lad Simon Mayer originates.

In an experimental manner, four performers and musicians make use of traditional alpine live music, various group dances and ritualised practices. Liberating them from conservativism and conventions, they establish an unseen fusion of artistic reinterpretations and temporary social attributions of meaning. Defying categorisation and pigeonholing, the Sons of Sissy do everything they can to live up to their name as they conduct themselves as part weird folk-music quartet, part experimentally playful ritual dance combo, using humour to radically...

Oh Magic wanders through the wonders of theatrical magic. It is that mysterious unnamable thing we sometimes have the chance to encounter in a piece. But, where does it come from and where does it take us? What fascinates us as a performer or as a spectator? Somewhere between freak and fascination, Simon Mayer and his performers seek for the answers both in technological manipulation and organic oracles.

Oh Magic is a live concert, played by robots and performers. Using musical instruments in an unconventional way they bring dance and performance, music and soundscapes, robotics and visual arts together on stage. Our futuristic fantasies take shape in today's technology, which never seizes to fascinate and –even if only a little— grab us by the troat. Our double relationship to robotics is prominently present in the universe of Oh Magic where performers and machines meet, with trembling voices and childlike curiosity. He finds his desire...

What does it mean to be together? In Mazing, five dancers are set in motion by the audience, creating visible networks of action which emerge from simple social negotiations. This gently destabilizing performance both challenges and strengthens notions of community, re- affirming the power of touch in the digital age.

Today, the social is a performance, and performance is a social event: how can we use this to generate new models of positive sociality through performance? Enter Mazing to catch a glimpse of one possibility, based on the simple power of the dancing body, the factuality of movement and the fragility of contact....

This is a dance of touch. The work exists in the active, tactile, engaged negotiation between performer and audience – in their tacit agreement and understanding. Arranged in an ellipse, the audience themselves form the bounds of the theatrical space. This is a journey that, by definition, performer and audience discover and create together.

After premiering the first version of The Palm of Your Hand 2015, we are now touring The Palm of Your Hand # 2 - a re-creation commissioned by the Human Body Project. This re-creation reimagines the piece by working with a group of blind and partially sighted people to help make the work communicate beyond sight....

Fabrice Samyn

A Breath Cycle

playground festival

première

A Breath Cycle consist of an ever-changing corpus of performances who share ‘breathing’ as their main focus. Seven performances on breathing or wherein the breath takes a central role will be presented in A Breath Cycle. All of the performances are based on a protocol.

This protocol serves as an open score that outlines the interaction of the performers, the collaboration between co-authors and frames the participation of the audience. The protocol is handed out to the audience at the entrance of the theatre and guides the audience from one breath piece to another. Following pieces will be shown in upcoming presentations of A Breath Cycle: Light's Treshold, Being Cloud, Undressing Time, The Womb, Vanity's Ballroom, Breath Border and Blink of the Night. In other words, following the terminology constructed by...

Spectacles is a research by Sara Manente starting from the distance between language and experience, specifically the experience of dance and performance.

Following the critical line that considers the overcapitalization of language as its transformation into an oppressive tool, the research aims to restore and emancipate the relation between language and dance from a point of view of performativity. What are the limits of language to talk about aesthetic experience? What do we talk about when we talk about dance? How do we talk about something we don't know how to talk about? Which language performs a choreography? How to move with(out) words? > Order a copy of the publication SPECTACLES...

Spectacles is a research by Sara Manente starting from the distance between language and experience, specifically the experience of dance and performance.

Following the critical line that considers the overcapitalization of language as its transformation into an oppressive tool, the research aims to restore and emancipate the relation between language and dance from a point of view of performativity. What are the limits of language to talk about aesthetic experience? What do we talk about when we talk about dance? How do we talk about something we don't know how to talk about? Which language performs a choreography? How to move with(out) words? > Order a copy of the publication SPECTACLES...

Oh Magic wanders through the wonders of theatrical magic. It is that mysterious unnamable thing we sometimes have the chance to encounter in a piece. But, where does it come from and where does it take us? What fascinates us as a performer or as a spectator? Somewhere between freak and fascination, Simon Mayer and his performers seek for the answers both in technological manipulation and organic oracles.

Oh Magic is a live concert, played by robots and performers. Using musical instruments in an unconventional way they bring dance and performance, music and soundscapes, robotics and visual arts together on stage. Our futuristic fantasies take shape in today's technology, which never seizes to fascinate and –even if only a little— grab us by the troat. Our double relationship to robotics is prominently present in the universe of Oh Magic where performers and machines meet, with trembling voices and childlike curiosity. He finds his desire...

The focus of Sons of Sissy is the universe of traditions, folk dances and folk music from which the Upper Austrian country lad Simon Mayer originates.

In an experimental manner, four performers and musicians make use of traditional alpine live music, various group dances and ritualised practices. Liberating them from conservativism and conventions, they establish an unseen fusion of artistic reinterpretations and temporary social attributions of meaning. Defying categorisation and pigeonholing, the Sons of Sissy do everything they can to live up to their name as they conduct themselves as part weird folk-music quartet, part experimentally playful ritual dance combo, using humour to radically...