Dance at KFDA: a corporeal feast

For dance aficionados, the KFDA is a scintillating feast of physical encounters from Belgian and international choreographers. Try, for example:

  • Moroccan choreographer Bouchra Ouizguen’s Ha!, in which her company of loose women from Marrakech blend the indigenous Aïtus cabaret tradition with sacred music composed by the ancient Sufi poet Rumi to create a liberating fusion of physicality and spirituality straight from the margins of society.
  • Equally as down to earth, the brother-sister team of choreographer/dancers from Tunis, Selma and Sofianne Ouissi immersed themselves in a rural community, studying the movements of a group of female potters, to extrapolate a choreographic language of natural, earthy sensuality. Their new work, Laaroussa, which combines dance with documentary video images, aims for intimacy with the audience and will be performed in the flexible studio space of the Royal Flemish Theatre (KVS).
  • Fancy something genuinely explosive? Brazilian choreographers often have a reputation or explosive work and Marcelo Evelin is not exception. After 20 years in Europe, Evelin returned to his native Teresina on the fringes of Brazil to further develop his unique and disturbing physical language with local dancers. He returns to the festival with his aptly named company Demolition Inc. Never intimidated by the darkest and most threatening aspects of human co-existence, his latest offering, aptly titled De repente fica tudo preto de gente (Suddenly everywhere is black with people) was inspired by Elias Canetti’s 1960 essay Crowds and Power and confronts us with the fragile boundaries between the I and the We when physical behaviour is determined by the corporeal proximity of a vast body of people.
  • As far as home-grown Belgian dance talent is concerned, Pierre Droulers’s latest choreography blends dance with light is aptly entitled Soleil.
  • Ula Sickle and Yann Leguay also offer a series of short solo pieces for a single female dancer with stroboscopic light effects to investigate the ways in which perceptions of the body are altered by light.
  • And Bruno Beltrão’s CRACKz blends the individual virtuosity of hip hop dance into a collective choreography using materials found on the Internet. It looks as if the main stage of the Théâtre National will be crackling with this tumultuous work dedicated to the processes of cultural dissemination and using “a repertoire of gestures created by mankind”.

Brussels can boast a wide variety of performance spaces from the magnificently restored Royal Flemish Theatre (KVS) through the art deco Kaaitheater to the modernist Théâtre National and in between many excellently accommodating small venues and studios carved out of renovated post-industrial spaces like the dance centres in the former sugar refinery La Raffinerie and the 16th century chapel Les Brigittines. The KFDA is an opportunity to investigate them all.

Wouters’s installation / performance takes place in the leafy grounds of the Natural History Museum. This year, the central ticket office and meeting place will be in the Beursschouwburg, another theatre building close to the historical centre of town. The ticket prices are remarkably affordable for everyone and there are also free events. So come along for a few days or the full three weeks and step into the dynamic world of top-rate global performing arts in an ambiance on a very human scale!

Further information about the programme is available in English, French and Dutch on the festival website www.kunstenfestivaldesarts.be.