Soil Biographies
LOD muziektheater Farida Amadou Melissa Mabesoone Louis Vanhaverbeke
Three versatile artists – Louis Vanhaverbeke, Melissa Mabesoone, and Farida Amadou – join hands for a sensory performance about earth, identity, and recovery. Drawing on their own personal journeys, they collaboratively build a performance intertwining queer imagination, mental health, and rural soundscapes.
After a period of mental turmoil, Louis found stability in agriculture. Land became his way of staying literally connected to the world. Melissa grew up as the daughter of a potato farmer in Zeeland and now works with that heritage as a performer and artist in the city, where she questions traditional gender roles with humour and sharpness in drag and performances. Farida, a bassist in the international improvisation scene, digs into the origins of the Blues as a Black musician. She seeks a new form of rural music – raw, honest, and not framed by clichés.
Between flight and refuge, beauty and filth, lies a hybrid landscape of sound, movement, and transformation. A place to ground and detach, with music as a language of care. This is not a classical story but a living performance, which invites the audience to feel, listen, and ground themselves again, together.
• Melissa Mabesoone is a multidisciplinary artist working with performance, installation, video, text, and scenography. Her work often explores the boundary between public and private, the everyday as political, and identities. She is part of the buren collective with Oshin Albrecht, with whom she created a series of critical, humorous performances, such as Blue Skies Forever, SPARE TIME WORK, and Shoe/Farm.
• Louis Vanhaverbeke is a performance artist and maker who intertwines styles and subcultures. His practice revolves around performances, installations, and the use of objects (often simple, colourful, or discarded objects) in relation to movement, spoken word, and sound. He has produced and toured internationally with performances including Kokito, The Bike Piece, MULTIVERSE, and Mikado Remix.
• Farida Amadou is a self-taught musician and performance artist. Her primary instrument is the electric bass guitar. She draws from genres such as blues, jazz, hip hop, experimental music, and free improvisation, and is known for her unconventional yet musical use of the Fender bass. She has collaborated with artists such as Peter Brötzmann and Thurston Moore, and in 2018 she joined the Liège-based punk/noise band Cocaine Piss. She performs regularly, is working on new albums, and investigates audiovisual performance formats and community-oriented workshops.
concept & performance Farida Amadou, Louis Vanhaverbeke, Melissa Mabesoone | concept & dramaturgie Dries Douibi | geluidstechniek Arthur De Vuyst | lichttechniek Leander Couplez | uitvoering scenografie Simon Van Den Abeele | productie LOUD muziektheater coproductie deSingel (Antwerpen), kunstencentrum VIERNULVIER (Gent), Theaterfestival Boulevard ('s-Hertogenbosch), Kaaitheater (Brussel) | residentie TalentLAB - Les Théâtres de la ville de Luxembourg | met de steun van tax shelter maatregel van de Belgische federale overheid
Tickets
