abonneer

#183

08.09.2026

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14.01.2027

Nieuwsbrief

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Happy and crappy art and critique: Larissa Velez-Jackson and her “Star Crap Method”

The non-Broadway performing arts scene in New York is characterized by a painful lack of funding that almost makes the situation in Europe seem luxurious. In the work of the New York based Larissa Velez-Jackson and her group “Yackez”, this economic condition becomes an aesthetic that prompts a reconsideration of some contemporary assumptions regarding the relations of artistic production, presentation, consumption and critique – as well as their residual material.

Amir Farjoun

review 26.10.2016

Simon Starling and Graham Eatough – At Twilight: A play for two actors, three musicians, one dancer, eight masks (and a donkey costume)

Set in the leafy grounds of Holmwood House in Glasgow’s Southside, Simon Starling and Graham Eatough’s performance At Twilight: A play for two actors, three musicians, one dancer, eight masks (and a donkey costume) was a successful example of the Common Guild Gallery’s commitment to putting visual art and theatre into innovative dialogue. The performance, which combined dance, music and drama, was striking for its structure, for the way in which W.B. Yeats’ Noh-inspired, symbolist play At The Hawk’s Well was placed within the framework of an artist’s talk or public lecture.

Carl Lavery

review 12.09.2016

A counterpoint reading of the Moussem Cities@Tunis Festival

Article appeared in Arab Stages, Volume 2, Number 2 (Spring 2016) ©2016 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Publication

The censorship and strict regulation of the public sphere during autocratic times in Tunisia took their toll on artistic freedoms as they anesthetized most of cultural life. The revolutionary movement however marked the beginning of the 21st century in a hopeful way. Five years later, the Nomadic Art Center, Moussem, invited five young Tunisian directors to show their work on the stages of BOZAR and the  “Maison des Cultures” in Brussels.   The festival explored how artists look back on this period and tackled the question how artists can contribute to the construction of a new social conscience on the ruins of an autocratic regime.

Joachim Ben Yakoub, Fida Hammami

review 20.05.2016

Nieuwsbrief

The labor of sense-making

On spectatorship and the oracular potential of art

For several years now, Julien Bruneau has been developing artistic practices inspired by the oracle. This term refers to both the person who mediates between god and man and to the enigmatic message that the gods convey through this medium. Bruneau’s research fits within a broader interest in the intellectual project of philosophers such as Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers, who want to bring back the oppressed forms of knowledge production and meaning given by modernity. At the moment it is crystallizing into the fascinating one-on-one performance Say. Etcetera wondered if his work could teach us something about the role and practice of the spectator.

Julien Bruneau

article 15.03.2016

Mount Olympus. To glorify the cult of tragedy, a 24 hour performance – Jan Fabre/Troubleyn

Regime art

‘Breathe, just breathe. And imagine something new.’ After sitting for a gruelling 24 hours you, at last, hear the closing words of Mount Olympus. A quarter of an hour earlier the audience in the Bourla Theatre in Antwerp had stood up en masse already to cheer on Jan Fabre’s ‘warriors of beauty’ who, covered in colourful layers of paint and glitter, were rhythmically shaking their backsides up and down in the direction of the audience. It’s called twerking. This dance move became world famous thanks to superstar Miley Cyrus who, in the world of mainstream pop culture, enjoys the dubious status of having pushed back even further the limits of the pornification of the human body. What does Fabre himself actually understand by ‘something new’? The aura of a heroic social resistance hangs around his ubiquitously hyped, superlative-laden ‘masterpiece’, while the performance merely reproduces the dominant ideology of our time in a heightened form.

Sébastien Hendrickx

review 04.02.2016