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Indepth Arts News:
"Sixth Now Annual Festival Opens in Brussels Today"
2001-05-04 until 2001-05-26
KunstenFESTIVALdes Arts
Brussels, ,
BE Belgium
From 4 to 26 of May, the KunstenFESTIVALdesArts descends again on Brussels. This sixth edition presents 29 projects: A subtle balance between 14 existing works, amongst the favourites, and 15 newly created projects, full of promise. Don't look for just one theme, territory, language, aesthetic quality or single discipline - the KunstenFESTIVALdesArts is a hybrid, like this century. More than by reason or a strategy of some kind, they made selections following their intuition.
For 23 days in Brussels, the disparate particles in this alchemy will come to life. One thing
is sure – like us, these artists are not at peace with our world. They tease it, dig into it,
and look for the symptoms of its aberrations beneath the surface. Surprisingly, few of
them are attached to a large structure. More nomadic than that, they walk the tightrope
over a void of tranquillity. Surprisingly too, most of these projects focus on the private
world of feelings and relationships, as if we need to first observe the secret of the private
in order to grasp the public.
Gathered together in May, these projects set the Festival’s tone. Personal and familiar,
they contain conversations, confidences and confessions. Is it coincidental that Sicilians
Spiro Scimone and Francesco Sframeli, Argentinian Federico León, Chinese Australian
William Yang, Croatians Natasa Rajkovic and Bobo Jelcic, Belgians Josse De Pauw and
Lorent Wanson and Svevo/Kentridge’s Zeno bring the family onto the stage, the nucleus
where our first human relationships are forged? What goes on in our daily lives forms our
experience of society – difficulties with living together, communicating and positioning
ourselves in the time and spaces in which we live.
These texts ‘on the family’ are new works, mostly by actor-writers – no literary effects or
grand discourses are made – and are being performed alongside cult repertory works that
have lost nothing of their vital energy and subversive force. The unusual Bartleby by
Herman Melville (1819-1891), the fiery Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), the
overwhelming Carnet d’un disparu (Diary of One who Disappeared) by Leos Janácek
(1854-1928) and the vertiginous La Coscienza di Zeno by Italo Svevo (1861-1928).
All works of maturity, created during the writers’ twilight years. All works of premonition,
mostly born at the transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at the dawn
of a capitalism sealing mankind’s fate – more powerful, more forlorn, more destitute.
Elsewhere, baroque madrigals and L’Incoronazione di Poppea enrich the Monteverdi
cycle which began in 1998 – summits of sublimity and cynicism.
Further on, what lies at the margin of the page reveals what is written on it. Arne Sierens,
François Verret, Lorent Wanson and Valdés Kuri are directing characters driven into
silence to question our ‘models’ of society. Echoing this, Xavier Le Roy, the Festival
Jonctions and the event Capture at the Halles de Schaerbeek flush out mechanisms that
make us mere passive cogs in a giant machine of consumption. Walid Ra’ad questions his
Lebanon and Boyzie Cekwana his new South Africa – can a peaceful future be
constructed without past hatreds being remembered?
Human turbulences, that are joyful and melancholic, intimacy just beneath the surface,
dreams probing the forests of the unconscious, disturbing currents forcing the world
towards the shore of individuals – the artists in the 2001 Festival lend them bodies,
images and voices through dance, theatre, music, video, photography and new
technologies. They are inventing for them a new freshness that reveals itself behind
smooth surfaces. Venture to the other side of the lens, this black hole, behind the mirror
where human nature waltzes unbridled, where the spectacle of the world waltzes without
its mask...
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