danzon_eng

Interview with one of the four Netherlands-based theatermakers in PerformLab exchange programme in Istanbul.  Ayşe Draz & Mehmet Kerem Özel [The Turkish translation of this interview is published on  art.unlimited ] ©  Benny Stroet What is the essence of performance in your opinion? Evoking, manifesting, attempting to transcend pre-conceived ideas and to encounter the unknown.  How do you define contemporary performance? A continuous search in how the conflict of different times can be fertile.  Do you believe in the transformative power of art? How? My experience with the transformative power of art is; it created a public safe space, ‘a society’, where intuition is followed and perspectives questioned in uncensored ways. Very much aware that this is not evident everywhere in the world. How do you think that this pandemic which humanity is facing at a global scale today will transform performing arts in the future? I believe the pandemic forced us to questi...

© Natalia Jabanow Kunstenfestivaldesarts, which was founded in 1994 by Frie Leysen (one of Belgium's most important cultural figures who unfortunately died last year), focuses on contemporary theater, performance and dance, and also includes cinema and visual arts. The festival takes place in Brussels every year in May. However, especially for this year, an additional week was added to the festival in July. When the program was announced, all of the indoor performances in May would be staged face-to-face and a selection of them would be streamed live online. Due to the course of the pandemic, all the indoor performances in May were canceled and only online streams of live or recorded performances were left in the program. Outdoor shows and visual art exhibitions take place under Covid-19 measures as planned. Thanks to the online program that removes physical borders, I had the opportunity to follow the festival. Pieces of a Woman The first of the online streams was Pieces of a Woma...

Choreographer, dancer, dramaturge and writer Raimund Hoghe, one of the most distinctive figures of contemporary performing arts, suddenly passed away at his home in Düsseldorf on May 14th. Hoghe was going to participate in a live conversation after showing excerpts of his pieces on the 14th and 15th as part of this year's online version of the Dance festival held in Munich every two years.  Hoghe was born in 1949 in Wuppertal. He was working as a dramaturge in the Tanztheater Wuppertal between 1979 and 1989 when Pina Bausch began to form and mature her dance theater aesthetics. If I count only a few of the works of those years, for example "Viktor", "1980", "Bandoneon", it would be impossible not to give credit to Hoghe for he was one of the members of the creative team at the peak of Bausch's art. In addition to these three, I also want to name two pieces of Bausch, "Auf den Gebirge hat man ein Geschrei gehört" and "Two cigarettes i...

© Jan Versweyveld A wide corridor-like void in the middle of the playing area that goes deep backwards. The void gets twice as deep with the reflection in the mirror covering the very back. It is as if the depth of the space brings with it the depth of time. Traces of the past in the depths of the space seem to be visible… Chairs are lined up on both sides of this void. The members of the family whose story is told in the play sit on these chairs from time to time. Even if all the family members are seated, there are chairs which remain empty. Maybe those empty chairs mark the family members before and after the story that we haven't seen, expanding the time of the story… Behind the chairs are large transparent surfaces with grotesque and primitive face figures drawn on them with mud. Maybe they are the ghosts of the past… The servant of the family brings chairs from both sides to the front and middle line of the void. The couple, in their 90s, in the center of the story sit on tho...