Can light be a compositional building block? The Liquid Room Series radically questions the classical concert model. The audience is free to move around among the various stages set up in the dismantled hall of the Kaaitheater. Immerse yourself in a pure experience of sound and light!
What would hell look like today? The 500th anniversary of the death of Hieronymus Bosch, made Vasco Mendonça, Kris Verdonck and Dimitri Verhulst think. They quickly arrived at the beaches of Lampedusa: a place where while tourists were sunbathing refugees were washed up on the beach. The false paradise of the resorts and the Boschian hell on earth seamlessly flow into each other.
Marc Vanrunxt creates a dance performance based on the work of the solitary Lucien Goethals, pioneer of Flemish electronic music. The result acts as a journey through time, towards what in the 1970s was still the music of the future, and which quite possibly still sounds like that now.
This brand new production directed by Ivo Van Hove is based on Leoš Janácek’s song cycle that goes by the same name. The result of Janácek’s inspired efforts is a mysterious, deeply emotional and psychological piece on identity, alienation, and an impossible love. Annelies Van Parys – one of the most acclaimed Belgian composers of our time – adds a fi tting contemporary reply.
Dancer and choreographer Fumiyo Ikeda takes you on a journey to the heart of Morton Feldman’s Piano and String Quartet. This 80-minute composition for piano and strings exudes an aura of tranquillity, in which ‘each is just as much an echo of the other’. Ikeda shares the stage with the soloists of Ictus, as though she herself were the sixth musician.
Inspired by the hymn Say No!, more than 30 choirs and ensembles from across the world have created their own song about conscientious objection and desertion. All the contributed images and sounds form the material for a video creation, intertwined with a live performance by a huge international choir.
Stef Kamil Carlens was inspired by folk art, rituals, beautiful creatures from European folklore traditions, and early twentiethcentury modern art. Enter into this wonderful world of dance, music, word, costumes, and masks!
Three singers/performers create a succession of intriguing tableaux vivants. Ivo Dimchev’s stream of consciousness simultaneously appears on the rear wall. He harnesses the power of the voice, extreme theatricality and a whole arsenal of temperament, and goes in search of what opera is and can be.
For his Concertos, the born performer Ivo Dimchev always invites a different musician for a voice improvisation in the form of a concert. At the Kaaitheater, he performs alongside the composer and pianist Lea Petra, who has been highly praised for her tango transcriptions for piano.
