About
Ezra Veldhuis and Bosse Provoost have been collaborating since 2018 to create performances at the intersection of performance and installation art.
Ezra Veldhuis (NL, °1991) is active in both performing and visual arts. She completed the master’s degree in visual arts at the School of Arts|KASK Ghent in 2017. She has a multidisciplinary practice focusing on light as a material and subject. She makes performances, installations, paintings and videos as well as working as a lighting designer and scenographer. Her paintings were selected for the KOMASK Prize 2017 and the Great Ernst Albert Prize 2018.
Since 2021, she has been affiliated with School of Arts|KASK Ghent as a researcher through the Reflecting Light Research Group. In 2022, she came second in the Fintro Prize for Theater & Dance and won the Audience Award in the same category.
Bosse Provoost (BE, °1993) is a performing artist and director. He graduated from the master’s program in Drama at School of Arts|KASK Ghent in 2016. He made his first performances (Herberg, Moore Bacon! and The Act of Dying) in collaboration with Kobe Chielens, with whom he explored the physical language of animation film figures. In 2016, Bosse and Kobe received the KBC Young Theatre Award at Theater Aan Zee and Het Debuut at ITs Festival for their performance Moore Bacon!. Between 2017 and 2022, Bosse was an associate artist at Toneelhuis.
Together, Ezra Veldhuis and Bosse Provoost made Matisklo (2018), SUN-SET (2020) and Indoor Weather (2021). Their most recent show All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace premiered at CAMPO in October 2023, and is currently touring.
With light shifts, sound patches and silences, Ezra Veldhuis and Bosse Provoost compose ever-changing spaces. Performers sometimes remain completely absent, or are about to be absorbed by these environments. In that same twilight zone between presence and absence, non- or semi-human figures also pass by.
Although there is an unmistakable theatricality in their work, the performances of Bosse Provoost and Ezra Veldhuis increasingly rely on compositional and choreographic principles, both in the performance dramaturgy and in the approach to light, sound and performers.
For them, the theatre is a place for metaphysical adventure, a space for confrontations with the weird and for extra-ordinary experiences of space and time. In performing arts, they look for a ‘de-automation’ of our reading of the world, both on a sensory level (what do we pay attention to, what don’t we pay attention to?) and on a cerebral level (what place do we assign ourselves in the world?).
They draw a lot of their inspiration from science fiction, but in particular, poetry occupies an important place in each of their performances. They are attracted by the instability of meaning, by the openness and obstinacy of poetry. Rather than using poems as textual material, they try to translate a specific poetics scenically. In this sense, their performances can be viewed as scenic poems.
Among others, their work has been and will be shown at Toneelhuis, NTGent, KVS, Viernulvier, Kunstencentrum STUK (Belgium), SPRING Performing Arts Festival, Boulevard Festival, Jonge Harten Festival (Netherlands), Théâtre de la Bastille, NEXT Festival (France), Auawirleben (Switzerland)…
