Next season we shall be presenting a new work by the choreographer Jean-Luc Ducourt and the pianist Alain Franco called Works by 3/1, a choreographic composition for one female and three male dancers, and a piano. It was only a few years ago that Ducourt developed a language of movement based on classical ballet. This provides the basis for the new work too, which he conceived for three male dancers with one female dancer as a counterpoint.

KUNSTENFESTIVALDESARTS 08 - Over the last ten years Thomas Hauert has, both at home and abroad, shown himself to be a choreographer with a voice of his own. His latest piece, Accords, is an abstract choreographic composition that one experiences like a piece of music. The dancers physically transpose, amplify or distort the dynamics, harmony, melody and counterpoint in their bodies.

Ars Musica - At Expo 58, Varèse’s Poème électronique was performed in the Philips pavilion, which briefly put Belgium at the peak of developments in electronic music. On this night of electroacoustic music, while lying or sitting on cushions, you will be able to discover (or rediscover) the work of the pioneers, performed by the Orquestra del Caos, an orchestra without musicians.

Ars Musica - At the end of November La Monnaie, Bozar, the Kaaitheater and Ars Musica Winter presented Georges Aperghis’ Avis de Tempête, an event of the highest order. Gives you an appetite for more. Machinations, first performed in 2000, is pure Aperghis and is the liveliest and most moving piece he has ever written. Music, text, video and performers enter into an alchemical combination.

Ars Musica - Le Grand Gamelan is the title of a suite composed by Bo Van de Werf of the Octurn jazz ensemble for an imaginary gamelan group comprising the eight musicians of Octurn and the five percussionists from Ictus. The spirit of the ‘gamelan’ is evoked by the expanded percussion section (marimba, vibraphone, celeste, gongs, glockenspiel and tubular bells, and traditional elements of the gamelan).

In Zeitung, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and pianist Alain Franco, together with the Rosas dancers, go in search of the unstable combination of music and dance, choreography and improvisation, romance and disillusion and of the essential building blocks of choreography. Alain Franco provides live piano accompaniment for the nine dancers.  The music is by Bach, Webern and Schönberg.

Four ‘identical’ female dancers hang like marionettes in a huge ‘machine’. Together with them performance artist Kris Verdonck generated a passage of choreography: a solo, a duet, a trio and a pas de quatre. They sought the greatest possible freedom from the machine, but sooner or later it sent them in the direction it decided upon.

They grew up in the USSR, where several of them were musicians on the underground scene in Moscow, and after the fall of the Wall they left for Berlin, where, in 2006 and on the initiative of the artist, poetess and singer Irina Doubrovskaya, they formed the group Ersatzmusika. It has a sound all its own, in which one hears traces of dub, urban folk, world, minimal, gipsy music and musical cast-offs from the Soviet period.

Three composers, Iannis Kiriakides, Dimitri Kourliandski and Serge Verstockt, are each composing a work for the combination of Champ d’Action and Slagwerkgroep Den Haag, a combination of three to six percussionists, an equal number of ‘ordinary’ instruments and live electronics. This is the sound of the 21st century!

There are more than 6000 names for the wind around the world. Fascinated by this almost ‘virtual’ natural element, the choreographer Karine Ponties, composer Dominique Pauwels and artist Lawrence Malstaf are creating a performance about invisible forces and their visible traces, and on the impact of elusive energy and endless movement.

The Swedish artist and composer Carl Michael von Hausswolff, who participated in Documenta in 1997, has written and staged a play about six ‘classic’ methods of torture that use water, light, sound, heat, etc. In Death is Certain, the Berlin performance artist Eva Meyer-Keller is a perfidious kitchen queen who puts vegetables to death. They are throttled, shot, drowned, poisoned and so on.