What better way to represent the depressing inertia of Chekhov’s antihero Ivanov than by an enormous couch with comfortable cushions? For the better part of the performance Ivanov sits, no, slouches there, an indolent layabout who has given up caring a rap about his surroundings, his wife, her mortal illness or his own botched life.…
Casus brings humanity into circus through a breathtaking and fragile display of skills. Through bold, quirky and captivating performance the four members of Casus (Emma Serjeant, Jesse Scott, Natano Fa’anana and Lachaln McAulay) bring a wealth of knowledge and experience into this innovative work, having previously performed extensively in Australia and around the world with C!RCA, Legs on…
In Coup Fatal 13 musicians from Kinshasa, conducted by Rodriguez Vangama, are engaged with the repertoire of various baroque composers. The Congolese counter-tenor Serge Kakudji selected the arias. The original music is enriched with the diversity of the musicians. Around the vocal parts of Serge Kakudji, a whole new contemporary universe is created, both in music and…
The Pianist is a contemporary solo circus performance centred on, in, under and around that most magnificent of instruments, the grand piano. One of his country’s most accomplished young actors, New Zealander Thomas Monckton trained at the Jacques Lecoq School in Paris, the city he has made his home. The Pianist mixes highly skilled physical comedy with a…
In 1980, Marie Chouinard discovered the book Mouvements by Henri Michaux (1899-1984). In 64 pages of India-ink drawings, a 15-page poem and an afterword, Mouvements presents multiform figures that Marie Chouinard took pleasure in reading literally, left to right and page by page, as a choreographic score. She then proceeded to decrypt the great artist’s…
‘ Vandekeybus’s dances combine startling and often extreme imagery with highly physical and dangerous-looking movement that is almost as exhausting for the audience to watch as it is for the dancers to perform’ Financial Times Witches, magicians, demons. You find them in every culture, but they always signify something different. An inspiration and collaborator of…
Tangram skillfully redraws the boundaries between classical dance and circus. In this beautiful heart-felt duet between a ballet dancer and a juggler the unlikely couple explore the trials and tribulations of a relationship with both furious passion and tenderness. Whether she is gracefully hanging from her partner’s fingertips like a marionette or he has to…
A Tranquil Star Fitri Setyaningsih (Indonesia) At the end of A Tranquil Star six white rabbits hop about the stage. Tiny bodies impervious to stage directions that map their own path through the space. The contrast with the extremely precise choreography that precedes this final scene is enormous. Six dancers move slowly across the…
The starting point for Alain Platel’s new creation is Marco Prado’s documentary Estamira, telling the story of a woman who suffers from schizophrenia and who lives and works in a Brazilian waste disposal site. She has developed her own very particular way of communicating, giving rise to the theme of the piece: how to live…
Liaison Carbone is a particle physics at human scale. “Our juggling matter emerges from the manipulation of a large number of objects, like physical matter is made of a large number of atoms. One doesn’t see a few balls or a few rings anymore, but a whole set with a particular behavior, passing through solid, liquid…
