Ugnė Noreikė | Etcetera

Ugnė Noreikė

Ugnė Noreikė is a Lithuanian writer, musician and artist. She works in spaces of not knowing, vulnerability and extreme feelings. She’s looking for meeting points between sounds and words.

YOU CANNOT CAN – Dana Michel

Ambient insecurity

In You Cannot Can, Dana Michel steps onto the slippery floor of a public pool in the centre of Brussels to question all the manoeuvres one performs in life in order to swim in it. Masterfully, Michel (a marketing executive turned football player turned performer) makes herself infinitely disarming, un-intimidating, small and, at the same time, envelops us in her shine to reveal and loosen the ever-present ambient insecurity of today’s interactions.

M.O.L. – Sara Oklobdzija / ROBIN / KVS

Spelen op het veld voor het veld / Playing on the Field, for the Field

In Double Take gaan twee Etcetera-auteurs naar een voorstelling en schrijven ze elkaar in het zog ervan een brief. Alina Savitskaya en Ugnė Noreikė schrijven elkaar na M.O.L. over aardappelen, integratie en de vraag of het cultuurveld bereid is zijn handen vuil te maken. “De patat die ik op het einde vasthield, woog zwaarder dan haar speech.” // In Double Take, two Etcetera authors attend a performance and write each other a letter in its wake. Alina Savitskaya and Ugnė Noreikė write to each other after M.O.L. about potatoes, integration, and whether the cultural sector is willing to get its hands dirty. “The potato I held at the end had more weight than her speech.”

Magritte – Ika Schwander

Wading in the river

A headless suit, disembodied legs, a floating apple: Ika Schwander brings Magritte’s uncanny imagery to life in this commissioned performance at KMSKA. Wading through his surrealist universe, Schwander stirs the waters of his founding trauma: the drowning of his mother. And in restaging that story, Schwander dismantles the myth of the lone genius: what if Magritte’s art equally belongs to his mother Régina, to his wife, to all of us?

Holy – Martha Canga Antonio

Whole or holy?

To call something holy is to give it a preciousness, to make it worth our uninterrupted attention. A morning routine can be non-negotiable, a dessert after dinner habitual, an afternoon with dear ones invaluable. But something holy seizes your whole being with force, with undeniable meaning, and it’s never self-inflicted. Experiencing holiness makes you forget yourself, and moves you from the individual to something greater, more united. How often do we experience this throughout the day? Not that often, I’d say. And yet, every waking moment on this earth is sacred and whole. This is not religious preaching, but a simple truth. If you ever just take a minute to realise all that needed to happen for you to be this combination of molecules, that’s simply miraculous. This is also true if we zoom out and see our being in the world as intertwined instead of individualistic. In Holy, Martha Canga Antonio guides us into sensing this sacredness by asking what it means to hold space for it.

Gaze – Laura Neyskens, Raphaël Vandeweyer, Inter:Action & laGeste

Eve meets Nora meets Madonna

In Gaze, choreographer Laura Neyskens and dramaturg Raphaël Vandeweyer explore how patriarchal dominant narratives control female bodies. Three dancers find themselves caged in a big terrarium which they themselves are unfamiliar with. Lacking agency, these women start to exercise the most recognisable movements that have been mostly performed by female bodies – moving like a doll, rocking a baby, dancing seductively, etc. However, the performance lacks a reflective moment, the agency is never given back to the dancers who after an hour long female-trope exorcism leave their confinement none the wiser.

Firestarter – Barbara Raes and Alexandra Broeder

A matchbox

How do you write about a ritual that you have no personal connection with, in which the role of the spectator is limited to watching and not participating? Ugnė Noreikė reflects on these questions, after seeing Firestarter, a collective fire ritual that opened the new theatre season of NTGent.

Frames – Not Standing/Alexander Vantournhout

Body movement in triptych

Choreographer Alexander Vantournhout and his three co-performers (Chia-Hung Chung, Axel Guérin and Emmi Väisänen) invite us once again to see a performance that defies gravity. The troupe, Not Standing, aptly describing their goal in their name, are looking for ways to challenge the limits of the body. This time, they take us outside to find positions that promise tension in the neck, numb legs and an aching back. But the spectacle will make you forget all these pains. Frames presents body movement as a triptych: a skylight, a window and a pillar. Three frames for three planes of existence: heaven, earth and spirit. What can a body struggling for its balance tell us about existence?

Mossy Eye Moor – Louise Vanneste

Beyond the visible

The 30th edition of Kunstenfestivaldesarts is the start of a new decade committed to defending the unusual, nurturing a space that questions the present, and seeking what lies beyond the visible. Louise Vanneste’s dance performance Mossy Eye Moor fits snugly within this framework and brings it to life in a unique way. It challenges our impatient times with a call to stay observant and radically open.

DARK – Kris Verdonck/A Two Dogs Company

Coded Clairvoyance

DARK premiered in the 13th edition of Trouble, a performance festival whose central theme this year revolves around invocations, evocations, magical or shamanic rituals, political actions in public spaces, and dialogues with the unseen. Kris Verdonck continues his exploration between the oppositions of being and non-existence in this three-part performance. The first one deals with unseen entities behind screens; the second is a Beckett recital in memory of Johan Leysen, a Flemish actor who passed away two years ago; the third and last part is a short musical act, with sounds coming from three sousaphones hanging on the ceiling while no one seems to be playing them.

Everything brings us back to the body – Ehsan Hemat

A heavy blanket

While watching my Everything brings us back to the body by Ehsan Hemat, my body relaxed. The heated room loosened the muscles, the light was never too bright. Seeing him carrying the weight of an 18-kilogram brass sheet gave a physical release, as if I was the one covered with a heavy blanket, and my hand just scribbled on to the page. What did it write? It turned to myths of Icarus and Sisyphus, people whose non-human counterparts – wings and a boulder – have extended and thus completed their physical form. And now Ehsan and his sheet are here before me, merging and fighting, inseparable in their opposition.

Sabah – Tomas Pevenage/Antigone

Take a drag

After having travelled through Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine, Tomas Pevenage comes on stage inspired by divas he heard, people he saw, and places he visited. He creates a fragmented, searching drag character who is stunning and never loses their composure, remains shining and charming. Sabah is a show that’s easy to love, funny, beautiful and entertaining. It delivers all you would expect of a queer cabaret. However, it kept me wanting. Can a show that comes from a place of conflict remain untouched by it?

My Body as A Commodity – Anne-Laure Vandeputte / KWP

Traumatheque

The difficulty with true stories told on stage is that they put a critique-resistant film around the performer. I can’t possibly say anything about the contents without touching upon the performer’s experience. I’m walking on eggshells, the whole thing becomes so entangled, an honest face behind a mask, as Vandeputte puts it. My only option is to talk about this mask, the wrapping of the contents of the performance. And that feels dishonest and shallow. If anything, I believed everything that Vandeputte said and did, I saw her mask break, I saw the 14-year-old stuck in a 30-year-old woman’s body that she talks about. So the only thing left to do is to answer honesty with honesty.

In Absentia  – Helder Seabra

Presence

What does it take to stay present in absence? What does it take to embody the void left by a loss? Helder Seabra comes back to these questions after 10 years. In Absentia first premiered in 2015 – back then it was challenged by the deteriorating financial state of the cultural sector. Once again the funding for the arts was cut which affected Helder Seabra’s work too. I haven’t seen the first take but it seems like the flame of this Portuguese choreographer is still burning. Moreover, the initial financial shortcomings that left Seabra with fewer performers hasn’t restricted his passion, but rather scarcity became the mother of invention. In absence, Seabra found the space to create something powerful.

GLITCH WITCH – Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods

Glitter Gravel

GLITCH WITCH by Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods shows three women stranded on a lifeless, seemingly toxic rave moon, strewn with half-buried disco balls and black glitter gravel. But juxtaposing a dead landscape with hyper-alive bodies that twitch and contort isn’t meaningful in itself. What is the relation of the performers’ bodies to this barren space? What do their movements mean, apart from limb spasms? The lack of clear intent renders the performance elusive, leaving any connection frustratingly out of reach.

Sottobosco – Chiara Bersani

A Mellow Marsh

In Sottobosco, Chiara Bersani guides our gaze to the life we overlook—crawling, contorting, and flourishing close to the ground. Together with Elena Sgarbossa, she unravels the hierarchies of life, imploring our minds to explore our bodies in relation to space.

Werken en dagen – FC Bergman

Technopositivism to salvation

FC Bergman, a group of mastermind theatre makers, come back with yet another prop-saturated and tech-savvy play. Werken en dagen, similarly to their previous work The Sheep Song is a commentary on society and its workings. Werken en dagen focuses, however, on the community instead of the individual.

Marah Haj Hussein – Language: no broblem

Folds in monoculture

In Language: no broblem, dancer and theatremaker Marah Haj Hussein fries an egg on the stage and it feels like trying do away with the useless yet enraging chicken-and-egg question. Who was first? The Palestinians or the Israelis? Who invented the hummus and the falafel? Are these almost ridiculous questions important in the face of a bloody conflict? The play seems to descend into a definite no, a no that dances through framing language boundaries. Yet the conflict is still there and the tension between national and individual identity is spun tightly, weaving a postmodern collage of language and identity. Through intimate encounters, Hussein explores how Palestinian Arabic and Hebrew intertwine in the minds of those navigating oppressive realities.

Carolina Bianchi & Carolina Mendonça – We do not comfortably contemplate the sexuality of our mothers (Kunstenfestivaldesarts)

I met Hydra in a damp cinema

This performance was commissioned by the Kunstenfestivaldesarts to commemorate legendary Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman and her oeuvre. Carolina Bianchi and Carolina Mendonça, both Brazilian, ran into many conundrums when given this task. Talking about the artist through the lens of their art overshadows them, says Bianchi. She explains that by engaging with the artist’s work we mistakenly think that we understand them, that we know how they think. It can happen that the art exhibits apathy to something the artist believes in, like, in Akerman’s case, romantic love.

Voice Noise – Jan Martens / GRIP

The most powerful muscle

In the respectful and mindful silences between the dance and music numbers the audience at the premiere of Jan Martens’ Voice Noise was shifting in their seats and coughing. I’d never been so aware of the voice noises produced by the audience, the different pitches and ages of coughs amused me. That was the audience’s answer to the often strange manoeuvres that the voice and the body performed on the stage. Six very different bodies, a set of muscles, moved on the stage as if pushed by yet another muscle, the voice. Is the voice a muscle, I ask myself. It has the power of one, answers Martens. Assembling separate performances and a few choreographed group dances, he seems to ask the question of how different, specifically usually silenced or forgotten female voices can move us.

Shelly Shonk Fiffit – Benjamin Abel Meirhaeghe / Toneelhuis

Space folk

There are many beautiful things in the universe. Some are majestic and grand, making us think outwards, others are humbling and small, drawing us inwards. In his new show, Benjamin Abel Meirhaeghe is combining both, once again bridging different genres, ideas and themes.

While we are here — Lisa Vereertbrugghen

A piece of old-school folk string tied to a hardcore stone

Can rave, despite its resistance to tradition, be a contemporary folk dance? Ugnė Jurelevičiūtė questions it during Lisa Vereertbrugghen’s new piece While we are here, that finds inspiration in hardcore techno, gabber style and Walloon peasant dances.

Bojan Djordrev — Politics of Colours / Chromopolitika

Layers, lines & colours

Bojan Dordjev is a performance artist from Belgrade educated in theatre and art theory. He’s the co-founder and editor of the platform TkH (Walking Theory) and the Journal for Performing Arts Theory (2001–2017). For his performance Politics of Colours / Chromopolitika he collaborated with Georgian artists. It is the opening act of the Belgian arts festival Europalia, dedicated this year to the Georgian art scene. In the introduction, he perfectly describes what it is about by saying something along the lines of ‘if you get lost don’t worry and let it take you somewhere, you’ll get the script at the end.’

Marthe Koning – What Pessoa Taught Me  / Louis Verlinde & Gina Beuk – BROKEBACK SHITSHOW

Within & Without

What Pessoa Taught Me and BROKEBACK SHITSHOW are part of the 2023 LAFS (Love at First Sight) theatre festival program. The festival takes place in Antwerp and focuses on the work of young theatre makers. At first sight, these two shows, both premiering at the festival, have little else in common. One is a one-woman show, brooding and minimalist in its setting; the other is a flamboyant Hollywood look-alike. However, despite being situated on different ends of the spectrum, they’re both pieces of reflection; Marthe Koning’s performance comes from deep within while Verlinde and Beuk focus on the outside, the shining veneer covering our society.

De uitnodiging – Laura Van Dolron

Smells like no spirit

The day I saw the play, my bike got stolen. This was the very first bike I got myself, my first bike in Belgium, a step towards making a permanent decision to stay here. It was a foldable bike that allowed me to travel more freely, to be in my flow, not to own a car. I form relationships with my things, and so after this bike got stolen I felt guilty for recently having been annoyed with it. But that day I was so happy about meeting a kindred spirit on the stage that I only cried of laughter.

Once Upon a Time – Febe Coysman

Another Piece of My Heart

In the sunny months of summer, cinemas around Europe move outdoors, organizing open-air screenings and often giving a dusting to old classics in the fresh air. Once Upon a Time by Febe Coysman shows that not only screens can move outdoors, but their plots and props too can step out of screens. A street in Oostende is transformed into a theater stage with a car as its centerpiece. And so a Tarantino-inspired Thelma and Louise go on a fearful trip full of loathing, all the while centering female friendship.

BUG – Max Colonne & Alicia Andries

Waiting for Gregor

BUG is the master’s thesis work (KASK) of Alicia Andries and Max Colonne. It uses Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a novel about one man, Gregor Samsa, and his transformation into an insect as a starting point. However, this time Gregor’s existential crisis is interpreted as a virus, a bug that latches on to the whole family, which is at the center of the play.