‘A BIGGER THING’

Lisi estaras / Opera Ghent

What does it mean to dance together? How do you build a community? Do you have to share the same values? The Argentinian choreographer Lisi Estaras will be working for a year with a diverse group of fifty dancers from Ghent around encounter, intimacy and understanding. Their identities and backgrounds form the basis for this large-scale dance theatre performance. For the occasion, the Ghent opera hall will be converted into a spectacular ballroom in which the at times stirring, then melancholic, tangos of the Argentinian composer Eduardo Rovira lead the dance. This undeservedly unknown tango innovator mingles musical influences from the most diverse styles in his compositions. That is precisely why they are the perfect soundtrack for the highly diverse stories that the inhabitants of the city of Ghent carry with them. A new society as a hybrid construction: the foundation for A Bigger Thing

‘Das Narrenschiff’

Monster Truck & Platform-K

In the Middle Ages, people with disabilities were taken out of the city onto so-called ships of fools and left to die on the open sea. Some 600 years later, the fools take to the stage and refuse to continue playing the roles assigned to them by society. In this play, people with disabilities tell a contradictory story of self-empowerment and liberation. The production questions conventional notions of physicality and intimacy while playing with the insecurity that this creates. Reduced to a bizarre feast, the performance group Monster Truck, in collaboration with Platform-K, generates an confounding new interpretation full of drastic ambivalence, humour and style-conscious cross-references to the Love Parade.

One thing becomes clear: ships of fools, on which social participation is offered as an exclusive journey and people with disabilities continue to be treated as third-class passengers, can only sink in perspective.

‘LAM GODS’

MILO RAU / NTGENT

Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, martyrs and angels: the motifs are Christian and spiritual. But the faces of the figures are realistic, they show faces from Ghent. The van Eyck brothers immortalised their patrons and clients, but also their neighbours and colleagues. Thus, one of the first works of modern realistic art was at once documentary and mythical, ordinary and universal.

Milo Rau mixes reality and fiction, amateurs and professional actors in his productions and has been engaged in the 'theatre of the real' for a decade. With Lam Gods, the production with which he opened his first season at NTGent, he brought fifty Ghent natives together on stage for a re-enactment of the famous panel by the Van Eyck brothers. Lam Gods, which premiered in the 2018-2019 season, is an ode to Ghent and its inhabitants.

‘ANT AND..’

Imagine creatures without a head, tail, legs or other body parts. 

Ant and.. presents us with a visual performance which triggers the imagination. Two figures move through the landscape, providing it with colour and at other times even converging with it. Through their movements, their appearances are transformed; one image evolves into another, anteaters become cylinders, cylinders become caterpillars and so on. It makes you wonder where the creature ends and the landscape begins. Ant and.. is a graceful play for people of all ages which keeps reinventing itself because of its ongoing adaptation to the changing surroundings.