The French musicologist and author Peter Szendy uses his book Ecoute. Une histoire de nos oreilles (Minuit, 2001) as the starting point for his talk. The choreographer Xavier Le Roy will be talking about music-and-performance projects, including his new production of Le Sacre du Printemps.

Linked to Alvin Lucier’s attendance of Pasta for Tired Dancers, the theatre-maker and theorist Bojana Cvejić will be showing music and live art films from the sixties and seventies, including work by John Cage, Nam June Paik, La Monte Young, Alvin Lucier and Robert Rauschenberg.

Mårten Spångberg’s Powered by Emotion is a reconstruction of Steve Paxton’s Goldberg Variations. Bojana Cvejić shows and comments on scenes from concerts, stage plays and dance productions made on the basis of Glenn Gould’s legendary recordings of the Goldberg Variations.

The German choreographer-researcher Thomas Lehmen is after a long absence again appearing on stage himself. He draws up an inventory of what he has already mastered, what he is currently learning, and what he would like to be able to do one day. How does one learn to walk, read, dance, make love, and so on?

The Canadian Antonija Livingstone is best known as a dancer with Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods, Benoît Lachambre and Vera Mantero. The Part is her own creation, and is a very humorous mixture of theatre, live art and dance.

Sarma, the online site for dance and live art criticism, presents the social critique project B-Chronicles, with a documentary by Jorge Leon, a lecture-performance by the young choreographer Eleanor Bauer and a game, developed by the sociologist Delphine Hesters and Dimitry Masyn.

In Hommages (1998) the American-French choreographer Mark Tompkins puts himself in the position of four people from the dance world who have been of great significance to him: Vaslav Nijinsky, Valeska Gert, Josephine Baker and Harry Sheppard. Le Monde: ‘A declaration of love for the theatre.’

This is a piece of typical performance theatre: hardly a word is spoken, and it’s all power to the image! In this grotesque nightmare the eccentric characters display their most horrible side. The play flirts with horror, David Lynch, serial killers and film noir. Raw and poetic images alternate at a rapid pace, taking your breath away and burning into your retina.

Hooman Sharifi and pianist Alain
Franco will together generate material by means of improvisation.
Rikke Bewaert and Kristine
Oren will in the meantime be performing passages from the performance
based on sentences from Roland
Barthes’ Fragments d’un discours amoureux. You will be able to
read these sentences beforehand and choose your favourite, and the
dancers will then perform for you the movements they have worked out
for that excerpt.

What happens if we want to escape human nature? The blurred distinction between animal and human appeals to us while at the same time filling us with distaste. In Hair from the Throat there is a plenty of experimentation with radical self-transformation and amateurish attempts at animalism.