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Geert Belpaeme is currently planning the creation of a new performance called Imaginary numbers, togehter with Estefanía Álvarez Ramírez. Première will be in 2025. We'll keep you Posted!
Geert Belpaeme is currently planning the creation of a new performance called Imaginary numbers, togehter with Estefanía Álvarez Ramírez. Première will be in 2025. We'll keep you Posted!
In October 2020, The Animals premiered, a performance that takes you to the zoo, a place where people watch animals. After the premiere, the performance went into forced hibernation. But a performance is a living organism that continues to grow, even when it is not played or seen. Be a Bear is the fever dream of a performance in hibernation.
Be a Bear is a Podcast by Geert Belpaeme and Esther Venrooy.
Elephant in the Room is an ever changing performative act that questions how and why we look at animals and what it means to be human in that context.
In this project, Geert Belpaeme reworks material from his earlier creation The animals into short performances outside the theatre, inspired in this by his current research into a contemporary clowning practice. Each time, the performances are adapted to location, audience, context and atmosphere and take different forms, from installations and interventions in the public space to full-blown clown gag. So each time different, but each time on the alienating edge between humour, tragedy, social criticism and freedom and at the crossroads between dance, performance and mime.
We count all the time: when we go to the shop, when we read the clock, when we dance, when we hold our breath to get rid of a hiccup. But also when we decide on the amount of asylum seekers we can take in or when we calculate the scope of a war or a natural disaster.
Imaginary numbers deals with the violence inherently present in counting: in calculating, encompassing, containing, excluding, making binary of a complex and multiple existence to make it fit into a stable worldview. We want to lift the stability of that counting from its hinges, both by disrupting the subject that counts, by offering the counting object a rebuttal, but also by derailing the numbers. For how tangible is that counting? How real are the numbers we count with? In quantum physics, mathematicians were found to need imaginary numbers to make the most fundamental calculations make sense. Our performance explores the imaginary numbers that interject our attempts to calculate our lives, desires and futures.
Imaginary numbers is a hybrid performance on the boundaries between dance, theatre and clowning that explores the critical potential of a contemporary clowning practice. This performance is a continued and intensified collaboration of theatre maker and performer Geert Belpaeme with dancer and choreographer Estefanía Álvarez Ramírez, who met during the creation of Please (don’t) let me be (mis)understood.
Imaginary numbers will premiere in September 2025.
In Please (don’t) let me be (mis)understood three figures perform the intrinsic frenzy of being human. To do so, they revert to an old, almost extinct, tradition: clowning. Using the clown’s nonsensical language and wobbly body, with gleeful recklessness and frivolous pretence, they make their way through human history and beyond.
Please (don’t) let me be (mis)understood is a hybrid performance that moves in between clowning, dance and theatre, a performance in which human bodies step out of their banks to play non-human relationships as well. Everything with the clown’s wink.
concept & direction: Geert Belpaeme / performance & creation: Estefanía Álvarez Ramírez, Geert Belpaeme and Stanley Ollivier / battery: Wim Segers or Arno Grootaers / co-direction: Bosse Provoost / dramaturgical advice: Mats Van Herreweghe / lighting design: Geert Vanoorlé / costume design & scenography: Carly Rae Heathcote / productional support: Famke Dhondt
production: l’hommmm / coproduction: C-TAKT, STUK en VIERNULVIER / spreiding: Vincent Company / in collaboration with CC Blankenberge, CC Strombeek, Cultuurhuis de Warande, De Grote Post, Dommelhof, Kaaitheater, Nona en Miramiro / with the support of the Flemish government and Culture Ghent
Please (don’t) let me be (mis)understood went into premiere on the 14th of January 2023 in NONA (Mechelen), and was afterwards performed in CC Strombeek (Grimbergen), Monty (Antwerp), De Grote Post (Ostend), De Nieuwe Vorst (Tilburg), C-Mine (Genk), Theater op de Markt (Neerpelt), STUK (Leuven) and Campo (Gent).
What is playing and how does it relate to our authenticity as human beings? Playing supposes that you play a certain ‘role’ within a set of rules. Playing theatre even takes it a step further because there is the glance of a viewer that enters the situation and unbalances it, thus creating a new ‘language’.
Using as a working title Playfulness Geert Belpaeme is writing an essay that departs from his pedagogical practice at the drama department of KASK / School of Arts in Ghent. There he teaches drama students in there first Bachelor year within a series of abstract improvisation exercises how they can design their presence on a stage. They examine how their presence in a space can in different ways elicit content, meaning or communication. In Playfulness Geert approaches playing from the perspective of movement. This way he can examine an essence of the performing arts, before there is a text, a character, a choreography, a concept or an idea. Or as Peter Brook describes it at the begining of The empty space: “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”
Playfulness is financed by the research fund of KASK / School of Arts in Ghent.
A publication with a strong desire for being a line.
In 2017 Geert Belpaeme and Heleen Van Haegenborgh made First, a performance with a piano in the lead role. They were inspired by Tik Tak (an iconic Belgian tv program for todlers), Barnett Newman and String theory to reflect on the linearity of our consciousness. For their passage during Het Theaterfestival in 2018, they published the text and the score of the performance, designed by Oshin Albrecht.
Negotiating Realities is a research cluster at KASK in Ghent.
Negotiating Realities stimulates transdisciplinary research marked by an attempt to relate to the complex realities that surround us: a plurality of coexisting and overlapping phenomena. This array of realities is a dynamic given that needs to be performed, designed and maintained by a panoply of agents, human and non-human alike. With uncertainty at its heart, Negotiating Realities re-imagines futures, presents and pasts beyond normative constructs and scrutinises the unequal distribution of the powers at play in objects, technologies, narratives, attitudes and documents.
Reflecting light is a research project about light and about lighting design in the arts.
Light is everywhere. It reveals and shapes the world we live in. Everything we see, every colour, form or texture we perceive, the atmosphere of a space, even the mood we are in, it all depends upon light. In the arts as well, many (if not most) disciplines use light as part of their practice. However, the practice of applying light to a space (called lighting or lighting design) is rarely acknowledged as an essential signifier. It seems to be taken for granted. In a wide spectrum of artistic practices light paradoxically lacks its own visibility and the theoretical framework to be recognized as an agency that generates meanings. That is why Reflecting Light wishes to build and broaden a living discursive practice around lighting.
Read more about the project on the website of KASK
We regularly publish a zine on topics related to light and lighting design. All issues can be read and downloaded here.
The Reflecting light research group consists of Emese Csornai, Henri-Emmanuel Doublier, Jan Fedinger, Jan Maertens, Tomi Humalisto, Bruno Pocheron, Ezra Veldhuis, Bram Coeman & Geert Belpaeme.
Reflecting Light is financed by KASK in collaboration with art centre Buda (Kortrijk), HAUT (Kopenhagen), Madhouse (Helsinki), DASPA (Kopenhagen) and UniArts (Helsinki)
In All Inclusive, Julian Hetzel questions the aestheticization of violence and the explosive force of image wars. Exploring the principle of “creation through destruction”, Hetzel imported several kilos of debris from a conflict zone in Syria to central Europe. These remnants of the war have now been transformed into art.
All Inclusive juxtaposes art and war, tourists and refugees, reality and imagination in a journey through a temporary exhibition space. You are invited to watch a visit through a museum where reality strikes back. What if we could capitalize empathy by making people watch people?
director: Julian Hetzel / performers: Kristien De Proost, Edoardo Ripani, Geert Belpaeme & lokale figuranten / dramaturg: Miguel Angel Melgares / artistic advice: Sodja Lotker / costumes: Anne-Catherine Kunz / technical: Korneel Coessens & Piet Depoortere / production assistant: Sabine Mangeleer
production: CAMPO i.s.m. Stichting Ism&Heit Utrecht
coproduction: Frascati Producties, Schauspiel Leipzig, Münchner Kammerspiele & SPIELART Festival
In Matisklo Bosse Provoost and five other theatre makers look for the limits of what can be enounced and represented, guided by the poetry of Paul Celan, costumes that engulf a human being and heaps of animate material.
On the stage some ambiguous and introvert 'figures' pass by. Which spread jumps in meaning and imagination emerge when these figures and the poetry of Celan meet each other?
As survivor of the Holocaust Paul Celan morally and linguistically searches for the limits. His poetry reaches for what is 'beyond' language: a world that far precedes or passes by human beings, an urge to speak from ones own being-dead. Every word is like a stone picked up and looked at from multiple directions.
director: Bosse Provoost / performers: Joeri Happel, Benjamin Cools, Ezra Veldhuis & Geert Belpaeme / dramaturg: Geert Belpaeme / sound design: Benjamin cools / costume design: Max Pairon / scenography & lighting design: Ezra Veldhuis / text: Paul Celan / Dutch translation: Ton Naaijkens
production: Toneelhuis & Kraagsteen / coproduction: Vooruit, Jonge Harten Theaterfestival
‘My Life with the Tree’ is een visuele trip die de sluizen van je verbeelding wagenwijd openzet. Het is een ode aan het mooiste en tegelijk meest tragische mechanisme in de mens: het verlangen. Want iets willen: dat is wat het leven voedt en vooruit stuwt. Het laat je steeds opnieuw je horizonten verruimen. Maar hoeveel mag er sneuvelen om je droom te bereiken? En wat als je dan hebt wat je dacht te willen?
Geïnspireerd op de condition humaine volgens Schopenhauer, creëert de jonge theatermaker Alexia Leysen met acteur Geert Belpaeme een eigenzinnige wereld die schommelt tussen fantasie en hyperrealisme. Laat je meevoeren in een beeldende reis, langs de omwegen van de fantasie en met de poëzie van het antispektakel.
The Animals is a playful requiem for a dying ecosystem and a failing image of humanity. The performance takes you to the zoo, a performative space where animals are forced to perform their otherness so that humankind can confirm itself – by watching. Zoos engage visitors in an historic ritual of a Western ordering of the world, teaching them to “gaze” at creatures made to be exotic through our imagining wild and faraway places. But in this zoo the boundaries are blurred between who is human and who is animal. In this zoo it is unclear who should perform (for) whom.
“Animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance.” (John Berger, Why look at Animals?)
director: Geert Belpaeme / dramaturge: Bauke Lievens / performers: Greet Jacobs & Sophia Bauer / lighting design & scenography: Geert Vanoorlé / sound design: Esther Venrooy / masks: Viktor Leestmans / costume: Valerie Le Roy / technical support: Geeraard Respeel / artistic advice: Mats Van Herreweghe
production: l’hommmm / coproduction: Vooruit / Supported by the Flemish Government, Culture Ghent, Buda, De Grote Post & KAAP
Previously performed at Vooruit (Gent), De Grote Post (Oostende), Buda (Kortrijk), Malpertuis (Tielt), Nona (Mechelen), Tweetakt Festival (Utrecht)
First is a collaboration of Geert Belpaeme with pianist/composer Heleen Van Haegenborgh. They were inspired by Tik Tak (an iconic Belgian tv program for todlers), Barnett Newman and String theory to reflect on the linearity of our consciousness.
First starts off from the idea that we, human beings, are ourselves the creators of the reality we live in. First is a pamphlet: an ode to beginning; a prelude danced by the first man, for the last man.
First was rewarded with the Price Roel Verniers in 2016 and played at het TheaterFestival 2018 in Antwerp.
Geert Belpaeme (text, creation & performance) / Heleen Van Haegenborgh (music & performance) / Mats Van Herreweghe (dramaturgy) / Ezra Veldhuis & Bosse Provoost (scenography) / Geert Vanoorlé (light design)
a production by l’hommmm, with the support of KASK School of Arts Ghent, Vooruit, Pact Zollverein, wpZimmer, KAAP and the price Roel Verniers 2016 (TheaterFestival, t-heater & Circuit X)
First was performed at KC Nona (Mechelen), Het TheaterFestival (Antwerpen), Vooruit (Gent), Festival Dansand (Oostende)
In The Act of Dying three performers try to die as cheerful non-human figures. They are looking for the ultimate freedom of the animation figure: to rise up again after a downright violent death. The performance is a reflection on the role of violence and death in our society. By approaching death from the light and playfull perspective of the animation figure, de polen try to reach a veritable tragic. The performers are assisted by a square and by the Third Symphony by Henryk Górecki.
‘They don’t know death, they don’t know sexuality, they don’t know suffering, you cut them into pieces, they’re reconstituted. There is no finitude, no mortality here. There is evil, but a kind of naieve, good evil. You’re just egotistic, you want to eat, you want to hit the other, but there is no guilt proper.’ (uit A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema van Slavoj Žižek)
created and performed by: Bosse Provoost, Kobe Chielens, Lieselotte De Keyzer & Geert Belpaeme / scenography: Sibran Sampers & Ezra Veldhuis / dramaturgic advice: Mats Van Herreweghe / technical: Britt De Jonghe
productie: de polen
co-productie: wpZimmer, Buda, Vooruit & Toneelhuis
met de steun van: de Vlaamse Overheid, TAZ, LOD & KAAP
The Act of Dying was performed at Vooruit (Ghent), KAAP (Brugge), TAZ (Oostende), Festival Boulevard (‘s Hertogenbosch), Love at First Sight festival (Antwerpen), Jonge Harten Festival (Groningen)
Fünf leichte tanzspiele tells the story of language. Not the language that we speak but a primordial language, a game, an imagination that preceeds understanding. Fünf leichte tanzspiele reveals how quickly language erupts, how easily we understand what we cannot apprehend.
Language, maths, science are not attempts to apprehend reality, they are a game in which people try to order experience through self-invented rules. There is no logic, there is no truth, there are only plays and players, rules and the application of rules.
Fünf leichte tanzspiele takes you back to the serieusness of being a child, where every form has to be discovered, where content is still abstract and abstraction is very normal.
Created & performed by: Geert Belpaeme, Mats Van Herreweghe, Loes Carrette, Benjamin Cools & Seppe Decubber
Light design: Timme Afschrift
Hoe houdt een mens zich staande in een architectuur – een desolate vlakte onder een brug – die zich onverschillig opstelt tot de mens die zich erin begeeft en hem door haar afmetingen fijn drukt? Het sterkste teken dat een mens er kan geven is er zijn of er niet zijn. 1 en 0 zijn instrumenten om iets uit te drukken. Er zijn. Er niet zijn. En vervolgens leest de architectuur als een partituur van ongewone ontmoetingen.
Herberg werd in 2015 gemaakt voor een zeer specifieke ruimte onder een viaduct in Ledeberg (Gent) om tijdens zonsondergang gespeeld te worden.
Het uitgangspunt van de voorstelling is altijd geweest om naar de ruimte, meerbepaald een grote vlakte met pilaren en een ‘dak’, te luisteren en haar niet iets op te leggen, wat ons bracht tot het proberen hertalen van een architectuur tot partituur. Een ander belangrijk onderzoek in de voorstelling is het verkennen van de mogelijkheden van een speler/mens/lichaam om over grote afstanden of bij weinig licht iets te communiceren, en welke mogelijkheden de visuele barrière van een afstand of zonsondergang bieden voor wat je wil vertellen.
In 2016 werden we uitgenodigd door Toneelhuis om Herberg te hertalen naar een locatie in de omgeving van Antwerpen. Omdat de voorstelling zo locatiespecifiek is, heeft de uitdagende hertaling naar het viaduct van Merksem ons tot een andere voorstelling geleid met inhoudelijke en vormelijke accenten eigen aan de locatie.
created and performed by: Bosse Provoost, Kobe Chielens, Lieselotte De Keyzer, Britt Bakker, Midas De Saedeleir & Geert Belpaeme
Sprachspiel is a performance on the line between art and philosophical experiment. In Sprachspiel Geert Belpaeme and Mats Van Herreweghe want to show how communication emerges out of playing, not out of understanding.
The performance was inspired by the idea of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein that language does not need clear-cut concepts or unambiguous signification. It is not necessary for you and me to share predetermined concepts and rules to be able to communicate. Language is use: Meaning arises only when an action is performed. In Sprachspiel Mats Van Herreweghe and Geert Belpaeme examine how such a playful, active language could emerge.
Created & performed by Geert Belpaeme & Mats Van Herreweghe / coaching: Charlotte van den Eynde / light design: Timme Afschrift in collaboration with students KASKdrama
Sprachspiel was performed at CC Ghybe (Poperinge), KC Nona (Mechelen), Flare Festival (Manchester, UK), CC hasselt, De werf (Brugge), Love at First Sight (Antwerpen), MSK (Gent), Pact Zollverein (Essen, D), Chambre d’O (Oostende), wpZimmer (Antwerpen), Les Ballets C de la B (Gent), Rataplan (Antwerpen)
In It says nothing to me about my life l’hommmm explores how man and his body is socialised when growing up. How we stand, walk, laugh or cry is shown to us from when we are little children. Family and friends are a huge influence, but also the world outside and the abundance of images and information we get fired at us. The way in which we move in this world is not natural, it tells the story of every encounter in a human being’s life.
This performance is a search for sincerity in the multitude of information. How ever hard we try, we will never completely coincide with the images that we hold up to ourselves. And in that failing, a human being becomes his own, unique self.
Directors: Geert Belpaeme & Mats Van Herreweghe – Cast: Seppe Cosyns & Loes Carrette
With Freetimer l’hommmm is making a series of theatrical studies about our performance-prone society: “You will be yourself, you will distinguish yourself because of what you do and wear.” We paint a picture in three studies of how modern man has to fit himself into an identity in which success and self accomplishment are the basis (you get what you deserve), an identity that is so rigid and narrowly defined that it turns us into compulsive and indigent people.
Study #2 is a very minimalistic performance that, in its purity, tries to reach an essence. In this performance we focus on how our compulsive urge for self-realisation influences our relations. The performance confronts languages. While one of the performers tries to explain herself and fails in her attempts, another performer succeeds in really expressing himself with a purely physical language that is at first incomprehensible but throughout the performance manages to exceed understanding. When language fails and movement gets a clear direction, the possibility arises to really grow towards each other, not in signification but in physical recognition.
Director: Mats Van herreweghe – Cast: Geert Belpaeme & Yinka Kuitenbrouwer
With Freetimer l’hommmm is making a series of theatrical studies about our performance-prone society: “You will be yourself, you will distinguish yourself because of what you do and wear.” We paint a picture in three studies of how modern man has to fit himself into an identity in which success and self accomplishment are the basis (you get what you deserve), an identity that is so rigid and narrowly defined that it turns us into compulsive and indigent people.
In Study #1 (2011) a man goes on a job interview. He has brought a large stick.
By & with Mats Van Herreweghe & Geert Belpaeme
In Gat l’hommmm is looking for its own little revolution. To attain that, we have to go back to the beginning: the big bang that put the void out of balance. The result: bodies in an empty space, people who start to relate to each other, who discover and scan each other. The possibility of a world that arises and at the same time the expectation that everything can become something, that everyone has to be someone.
Director: Geert Belpaeme – Cast: Michaël Canto Minjauw, Seppe Cosyns, Lieselotte De Keyzer, Elien Hanselaer & Lize Pede – Dramaturg: Mats Van Herreweghe
In the garden of Eden
a cat jumped over the fence
and everything changed.
Three actors on a scène try to go back to the origin. They want to play. Without gravity, without embarrassment and without restraint they dance, move, play as little children. And, as when little chidren play, it does not matter that the game is shifting all the time.
They are liberated form everything that ties them in this world: society, language, themselves. Unconcernedly they search for their own paradise. But still that one question lingers:
Où est le chat?
Director: Geert Belpaeme – Cast: Michael Canto Minjauw, Sanne Haenen & Seppe Cosyns – Dramaturg: Mats Van Herreweghe – Designer: Sarah Geirnaert – Coaching: Elsie de Brauw, Sam Bogaerts & Alain Platel.
PLEASE (DON'T) LET ME BE (MIS)UNDERSTOOD
Around About Circus, May 27th 2024
THE ANIMALS
Etcetera, 6 oktober 2020
FÜNF LEICHTE TANZSPIELE
Etcetera, 15 februari 2017
SPRACHSPIEL
Knack Focus, 1 april 2015
De Standaard, 26 februari 2015
FREETIMER -STUDY #2
Zone03, 28 oktober 2013
FREETIMER - STUDY #1
De Standaard, 2 augustus 2012
Geert Belpaeme is a Belgian performing artist. He graduated in 2010 at the drama department of KASK in Ghent where he has ever since been involved as pedagogue and artistic researcher.
The materiality of the narration, the impulsive imagination of the performer and a search for non-linear and (more recently) posthuman dramaturgies, have been recurring themes in Geert's practice both as performer and as performance maker. His artistic language combines playfulness with philosophical rigour in performances that want to challenge the prevailing narrative structures of our society.
Between 2010 and 2020 he worked together with Mats Van Herreweghe and interchanging collaborators under the collective name l'hommmm, creating performances that balance on the boundary between theatre, dance and philoshical experiment. The work of l'hommmm is characterised by a playfulness and abstraction that starts from an uninhibited imagination. With every performance l'hommmm tried to create a new language, a new way of generating meaning and communicating with an audience.
From 2015 till 2018 Geert collaborated with Bosse Provoost, Kobe Chielens and Lieselotte De Keyzer under the collective name de polen to create the performances Herberg and The Act of Dying.
Since 2020, Geert's work has evolved towards clowning. In his ever hybrid practice, he currently focuses on the power and relevance of clowning as a contemporary practice. This is not about the reproduction of the figure of the clown, as it exists today, almost as an archetype, in our imagination, but about reviving a rich and complex performative practice that held an important place in society until the mid-20th century. The clown is for Geert a vessel to materialise human (and non-human) aggression, violence, absurdity, hopelessness. The clown is a post-human performer who, with an unseen playfulness, lifts our existence from its hinges.
Besides his work as a performing playwright, Geert has worked as a performer, coach and dramaturge with Bosse Provoost, Alexia Leysen, Alexander Vantournhout & Bauke Lievens, Circus Katoen, duo André-Leo, Sinking Sideways, Julian Hetzel...
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Geert Belpaeme is currently planning the creation of a new performance called Imaginary numbers, togehter with Estefanía Álvarez Ramírez. Première will be in 2025. We'll keep you Posted!
Geert Belpaeme is a Belgian performing artist. He graduated in 2010 at the drama department of KASK in Ghent where he has ever since been involved as pedagogue and artistic researcher.
The materiality of the narration, the impulsive imagination of the performer and a search for non-linear and (more recently) posthuman dramaturgies, have been recurring themes in Geert's practice both as performer and as performance maker. His artistic language combines playfulness with philosophical rigour in performances that want to challenge the prevailing narrative structures of our society.
Between 2010 and 2020 he worked together with Mats Van Herreweghe and interchanging collaborators under the collective name l'hommmm, creating performances that balance on the boundary between theatre, dance and philoshical experiment. The work of l'hommmm is characterised by a playfulness and abstraction that starts from an uninhibited imagination. With every performance l'hommmm tried to create a new language, a new way of generating meaning and communicating with an audience.
From 2015 till 2018 Geert collaborated with Bosse Provoost, Kobe Chielens and Lieselotte De Keyzer under the collective name de polen to create the performances Herberg and The Act of Dying.
Since 2020, Geert's work has evolved towards clowning. In his ever hybrid practice, he currently focuses on the power and relevance of clowning as a contemporary practice. This is not about the reproduction of the figure of the clown, as it exists today, almost as an archetype, in our imagination, but about reviving a rich and complex performative practice that held an important place in society until the mid-20th century. The clown is for Geert a vessel to materialise human (and non-human) aggression, violence, absurdity, hopelessness. The clown is a post-human performer who, with an unseen playfulness, lifts our existence from its hinges.
Besides his work as a performing playwright, Geert has worked as a performer, coach and dramaturge with Bosse Provoost, Alexia Leysen, Alexander Vantournhout & Bauke Lievens, Circus Katoen, duo André-Leo, Sinking Sideways, Julian Hetzel...
What is playing and how does it relate to our authenticity as human beings? Playing supposes that you play a certain ‘role’ within a set of rules. Playing theatre even takes it a step further because there is the glance of a viewer that enters the situation and unbalances it, thus creating a new ‘language’.
Using as a working title Playfulness Geert Belpaeme is writing an essay that departs from his pedagogical practice at the drama department of KASK / School of Arts in Ghent. There he teaches drama students in there first Bachelor year within a series of abstract improvisation exercises how they can design their presence on a stage. They examine how their presence in a space can in different ways elicit content, meaning or communication. In Playfulness Geert approaches playing from the perspective of movement. This way he can examine an essence of the performing arts, before there is a text, a character, a choreography, a concept or an idea. Or as Peter Brook describes it at the begining of The empty space: “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”
Playfulness is financed by the research fund of KASK / School of Arts in Ghent.
A publication with a strong desire for being a line.
In 2017 Geert Belpaeme and Heleen Van Haegenborgh made First, a performance with a piano in the lead role. They were inspired by Tik Tak (an iconic Belgian tv program for todlers), Barnett Newman and String theory to reflect on the linearity of our consciousness. For their passage during Het Theaterfestival in 2018, they published the text and the score of the performance, designed by Oshin Albrecht.
Negotiating Realities is a research cluster at KASK in Ghent.
Negotiating Realities stimulates transdisciplinary research marked by an attempt to relate to the complex realities that surround us: a plurality of coexisting and overlapping phenomena. This array of realities is a dynamic given that needs to be performed, designed and maintained by a panoply of agents, human and non-human alike. With uncertainty at its heart, Negotiating Realities re-imagines futures, presents and pasts beyond normative constructs and scrutinises the unequal distribution of the powers at play in objects, technologies, narratives, attitudes and documents.
Reflecting light is a research project about light and about lighting design in the arts.
Light is everywhere. It reveals and shapes the world we live in. Everything we see, every colour, form or texture we perceive, the atmosphere of a space, even the mood we are in, it all depends upon light. In the arts as well, many (if not most) disciplines use light as part of their practice. However, the practice of applying light to a space (called lighting or lighting design) is rarely acknowledged as an essential signifier. It seems to be taken for granted. In a wide spectrum of artistic practices light paradoxically lacks its own visibility and the theoretical framework to be recognized as an agency that generates meanings. That is why Reflecting Light wishes to build and broaden a living discursive practice around lighting.
Read more about the project on the website of KASK
We regularly publish a zine on topics related to light and lighting design. All issues can be read and downloaded here.
The Reflecting light research group consists of Emese Csornai, Henri-Emmanuel Doublier, Jan Fedinger, Jan Maertens, Tomi Humalisto, Bruno Pocheron, Ezra Veldhuis, Bram Coeman & Geert Belpaeme.
Reflecting Light is financed by KASK in collaboration with art centre Buda (Kortrijk), HAUT (Kopenhagen), Madhouse (Helsinki), DASPA (Kopenhagen) and UniArts (Helsinki)
In All Inclusive, Julian Hetzel questions the aestheticization of violence and the explosive force of image wars. Exploring the principle of “creation through destruction”, Hetzel imported several kilos of debris from a conflict zone in Syria to central Europe. These remnants of the war have now been transformed into art.
All Inclusive juxtaposes art and war, tourists and refugees, reality and imagination in a journey through a temporary exhibition space. You are invited to watch a visit through a museum where reality strikes back. What if we could capitalize empathy by making people watch people?
director: Julian Hetzel / performers: Kristien De Proost, Edoardo Ripani, Geert Belpaeme & lokale figuranten / dramaturg: Miguel Angel Melgares / artistic advice: Sodja Lotker / costumes: Anne-Catherine Kunz / technical: Korneel Coessens & Piet Depoortere / production assistant: Sabine Mangeleer
production: CAMPO i.s.m. Stichting Ism&Heit Utrecht
coproduction: Frascati Producties, Schauspiel Leipzig, Münchner Kammerspiele & SPIELART Festival
In Matisklo Bosse Provoost and five other theatre makers look for the limits of what can be enounced and represented, guided by the poetry of Paul Celan, costumes that engulf a human being and heaps of animate material.
On the stage some ambiguous and introvert 'figures' pass by. Which spread jumps in meaning and imagination emerge when these figures and the poetry of Celan meet each other?
As survivor of the Holocaust Paul Celan morally and linguistically searches for the limits. His poetry reaches for what is 'beyond' language: a world that far precedes or passes by human beings, an urge to speak from ones own being-dead. Every word is like a stone picked up and looked at from multiple directions.
director: Bosse Provoost / performers: Joeri Happel, Benjamin Cools, Ezra Veldhuis & Geert Belpaeme / dramaturg: Geert Belpaeme / sound design: Benjamin cools / costume design: Max Pairon / scenography & lighting design: Ezra Veldhuis / text: Paul Celan / Dutch translation: Ton Naaijkens
production: Toneelhuis & Kraagsteen / coproduction: Vooruit, Jonge Harten Theaterfestival
‘My Life with the Tree’ is een visuele trip die de sluizen van je verbeelding wagenwijd openzet. Het is een ode aan het mooiste en tegelijk meest tragische mechanisme in de mens: het verlangen. Want iets willen: dat is wat het leven voedt en vooruit stuwt. Het laat je steeds opnieuw je horizonten verruimen. Maar hoeveel mag er sneuvelen om je droom te bereiken? En wat als je dan hebt wat je dacht te willen?
Geïnspireerd op de condition humaine volgens Schopenhauer, creëert de jonge theatermaker Alexia Leysen met acteur Geert Belpaeme een eigenzinnige wereld die schommelt tussen fantasie en hyperrealisme. Laat je meevoeren in een beeldende reis, langs de omwegen van de fantasie en met de poëzie van het antispektakel.
Elephant in the Room is an ever changing performative act that questions how and why we look at animals and what it means to be human in that context.
In this project, Geert Belpaeme reworks material from his earlier creation The animals into short performances outside the theatre, inspired in this by his current research into a contemporary clowning practice. Each time, the performances are adapted to location, audience, context and atmosphere and take different forms, from installations and interventions in the public space to full-blown clown gag. So each time different, but each time on the alienating edge between humour, tragedy, social criticism and freedom and at the crossroads between dance, performance and mime.
In Please (don’t) let me be (mis)understood three figures perform the intrinsic frenzy of being human. To do so, they revert to an old, almost extinct, tradition: clowning. Using the clown’s nonsensical language and wobbly body, with gleeful recklessness and frivolous pretence, they make their way through human history and beyond.
Please (don’t) let me be (mis)understood is a hybrid performance that moves in between clowning, dance and theatre, a performance in which human bodies step out of their banks to play non-human relationships as well. Everything with the clown’s wink.
concept & direction: Geert Belpaeme / performance & creation: Estefanía Álvarez Ramírez, Geert Belpaeme and Stanley Ollivier / battery: Wim Segers or Arno Grootaers / co-direction: Bosse Provoost / dramaturgical advice: Mats Van Herreweghe / lighting design: Geert Vanoorlé / costume design & scenography: Carly Rae Heathcote / productional support: Famke Dhondt
production: l’hommmm / coproduction: C-TAKT, STUK en VIERNULVIER / spreiding: Vincent Company / in collaboration with CC Blankenberge, CC Strombeek, Cultuurhuis de Warande, De Grote Post, Dommelhof, Kaaitheater, Nona en Miramiro / with the support of the Flemish government and Culture Ghent
Please (don’t) let me be (mis)understood went into premiere on the 14th of January 2023 in NONA (Mechelen), and was afterwards performed in CC Strombeek (Grimbergen), Monty (Antwerp), De Grote Post (Ostend), De Nieuwe Vorst (Tilburg), C-Mine (Genk), Theater op de Markt (Neerpelt), STUK (Leuven) and Campo (Gent).
PLEASE (DON'T) LET ME BE (MIS)UNDERSTOOD
Around About Circus, May 27th 2024
THE ANIMALS
Etcetera, 6 oktober 2020
FÜNF LEICHTE TANZSPIELE
Etcetera, 15 februari 2017
SPRACHSPIEL
Knack Focus, 1 april 2015
De Standaard, 26 februari 2015
FREETIMER -STUDY #2
Zone03, 28 oktober 2013
FREETIMER - STUDY #1
De Standaard, 2 augustus 2012
In October 2020, The Animals premiered, a performance that takes you to the zoo, a place where people watch animals. After the premiere, the performance went into forced hibernation. But a performance is a living organism that continues to grow, even when it is not played or seen. Be a Bear is the fever dream of a performance in hibernation.
Be a Bear is a Podcast by Geert Belpaeme and Esther Venrooy.
We count all the time: when we go to the shop, when we read the clock, when we dance, when we hold our breath to get rid of a hiccup. But also when we decide on the amount of asylum seekers we can take in or when we calculate the scope of a war or a natural disaster.
Imaginary numbers deals with the violence inherently present in counting: in calculating, encompassing, containing, excluding, making binary of a complex and multiple existence to make it fit into a stable worldview. We want to lift the stability of that counting from its hinges, both by disrupting the subject that counts, by offering the counting object a rebuttal, but also by derailing the numbers. For how tangible is that counting? How real are the numbers we count with? In quantum physics, mathematicians were found to need imaginary numbers to make the most fundamental calculations make sense. Our performance explores the imaginary numbers that interject our attempts to calculate our lives, desires and futures.
Imaginary numbers is a hybrid performance on the boundaries between dance, theatre and clowning that explores the critical potential of a contemporary clowning practice. This performance is a continued and intensified collaboration of theatre maker and performer Geert Belpaeme with dancer and choreographer Estefanía Álvarez Ramírez, who met during the creation of Please (don’t) let me be (mis)understood.
Imaginary numbers will premiere in September 2025.
The Animals is a playful requiem for a dying ecosystem and a failing image of humanity. The performance takes you to the zoo, a performative space where animals are forced to perform their otherness so that humankind can confirm itself – by watching. Zoos engage visitors in an historic ritual of a Western ordering of the world, teaching them to “gaze” at creatures made to be exotic through our imagining wild and faraway places. But in this zoo the boundaries are blurred between who is human and who is animal. In this zoo it is unclear who should perform (for) whom.
“Animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance.” (John Berger, Why look at Animals?)
director: Geert Belpaeme / dramaturge: Bauke Lievens / performers: Greet Jacobs & Sophia Bauer / lighting design & scenography: Geert Vanoorlé / sound design: Esther Venrooy / masks: Viktor Leestmans / costume: Valerie Le Roy / technical support: Geeraard Respeel / artistic advice: Mats Van Herreweghe
production: l’hommmm / coproduction: Vooruit / Supported by the Flemish Government, Culture Ghent, Buda, De Grote Post & KAAP
Previously performed at Vooruit (Gent), De Grote Post (Oostende), Buda (Kortrijk), Malpertuis (Tielt), Nona (Mechelen), Tweetakt Festival (Utrecht)
First is a collaboration of Geert Belpaeme with pianist/composer Heleen Van Haegenborgh. They were inspired by Tik Tak (an iconic Belgian tv program for todlers), Barnett Newman and String theory to reflect on the linearity of our consciousness.
First starts off from the idea that we, human beings, are ourselves the creators of the reality we live in. First is a pamphlet: an ode to beginning; a prelude danced by the first man, for the last man.
First was rewarded with the Price Roel Verniers in 2016 and played at het TheaterFestival 2018 in Antwerp.
Geert Belpaeme (text, creation & performance) / Heleen Van Haegenborgh (music & performance) / Mats Van Herreweghe (dramaturgy) / Ezra Veldhuis & Bosse Provoost (scenography) / Geert Vanoorlé (light design)
a production by l’hommmm, with the support of KASK School of Arts Ghent, Vooruit, Pact Zollverein, wpZimmer, KAAP and the price Roel Verniers 2016 (TheaterFestival, t-heater & Circuit X)
First was performed at KC Nona (Mechelen), Het TheaterFestival (Antwerpen), Vooruit (Gent), Festival Dansand (Oostende)
In The Act of Dying three performers try to die as cheerful non-human figures. They are looking for the ultimate freedom of the animation figure: to rise up again after a downright violent death. The performance is a reflection on the role of violence and death in our society. By approaching death from the light and playfull perspective of the animation figure, de polen try to reach a veritable tragic. The performers are assisted by a square and by the Third Symphony by Henryk Górecki.
‘They don’t know death, they don’t know sexuality, they don’t know suffering, you cut them into pieces, they’re reconstituted. There is no finitude, no mortality here. There is evil, but a kind of naieve, good evil. You’re just egotistic, you want to eat, you want to hit the other, but there is no guilt proper.’ (uit A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema van Slavoj Žižek)
created and performed by: Bosse Provoost, Kobe Chielens, Lieselotte De Keyzer & Geert Belpaeme / scenography: Sibran Sampers & Ezra Veldhuis / dramaturgic advice: Mats Van Herreweghe / technical: Britt De Jonghe
productie: de polen
co-productie: wpZimmer, Buda, Vooruit & Toneelhuis
met de steun van: de Vlaamse Overheid, TAZ, LOD & KAAP
The Act of Dying was performed at Vooruit (Ghent), KAAP (Brugge), TAZ (Oostende), Festival Boulevard (‘s Hertogenbosch), Love at First Sight festival (Antwerpen), Jonge Harten Festival (Groningen)
Fünf leichte tanzspiele tells the story of language. Not the language that we speak but a primordial language, a game, an imagination that preceeds understanding. Fünf leichte tanzspiele reveals how quickly language erupts, how easily we understand what we cannot apprehend.
Language, maths, science are not attempts to apprehend reality, they are a game in which people try to order experience through self-invented rules. There is no logic, there is no truth, there are only plays and players, rules and the application of rules.
Fünf leichte tanzspiele takes you back to the serieusness of being a child, where every form has to be discovered, where content is still abstract and abstraction is very normal.
Created & performed by: Geert Belpaeme, Mats Van Herreweghe, Loes Carrette, Benjamin Cools & Seppe Decubber
Light design: Timme Afschrift
Hoe houdt een mens zich staande in een architectuur – een desolate vlakte onder een brug – die zich onverschillig opstelt tot de mens die zich erin begeeft en hem door haar afmetingen fijn drukt? Het sterkste teken dat een mens er kan geven is er zijn of er niet zijn. 1 en 0 zijn instrumenten om iets uit te drukken. Er zijn. Er niet zijn. En vervolgens leest de architectuur als een partituur van ongewone ontmoetingen.
Herberg werd in 2015 gemaakt voor een zeer specifieke ruimte onder een viaduct in Ledeberg (Gent) om tijdens zonsondergang gespeeld te worden.
Het uitgangspunt van de voorstelling is altijd geweest om naar de ruimte, meerbepaald een grote vlakte met pilaren en een ‘dak’, te luisteren en haar niet iets op te leggen, wat ons bracht tot het proberen hertalen van een architectuur tot partituur. Een ander belangrijk onderzoek in de voorstelling is het verkennen van de mogelijkheden van een speler/mens/lichaam om over grote afstanden of bij weinig licht iets te communiceren, en welke mogelijkheden de visuele barrière van een afstand of zonsondergang bieden voor wat je wil vertellen.
In 2016 werden we uitgenodigd door Toneelhuis om Herberg te hertalen naar een locatie in de omgeving van Antwerpen. Omdat de voorstelling zo locatiespecifiek is, heeft de uitdagende hertaling naar het viaduct van Merksem ons tot een andere voorstelling geleid met inhoudelijke en vormelijke accenten eigen aan de locatie.
created and performed by: Bosse Provoost, Kobe Chielens, Lieselotte De Keyzer, Britt Bakker, Midas De Saedeleir & Geert Belpaeme
Sprachspiel is a performance on the line between art and philosophical experiment. In Sprachspiel Geert Belpaeme and Mats Van Herreweghe want to show how communication emerges out of playing, not out of understanding.
The performance was inspired by the idea of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein that language does not need clear-cut concepts or unambiguous signification. It is not necessary for you and me to share predetermined concepts and rules to be able to communicate. Language is use: Meaning arises only when an action is performed. In Sprachspiel Mats Van Herreweghe and Geert Belpaeme examine how such a playful, active language could emerge.
Created & performed by Geert Belpaeme & Mats Van Herreweghe / coaching: Charlotte van den Eynde / light design: Timme Afschrift in collaboration with students KASKdrama
Sprachspiel was performed at CC Ghybe (Poperinge), KC Nona (Mechelen), Flare Festival (Manchester, UK), CC hasselt, De werf (Brugge), Love at First Sight (Antwerpen), MSK (Gent), Pact Zollverein (Essen, D), Chambre d’O (Oostende), wpZimmer (Antwerpen), Les Ballets C de la B (Gent), Rataplan (Antwerpen)
In It says nothing to me about my life l’hommmm explores how man and his body is socialised when growing up. How we stand, walk, laugh or cry is shown to us from when we are little children. Family and friends are a huge influence, but also the world outside and the abundance of images and information we get fired at us. The way in which we move in this world is not natural, it tells the story of every encounter in a human being’s life.
This performance is a search for sincerity in the multitude of information. How ever hard we try, we will never completely coincide with the images that we hold up to ourselves. And in that failing, a human being becomes his own, unique self.
Directors: Geert Belpaeme & Mats Van Herreweghe – Cast: Seppe Cosyns & Loes Carrette
With Freetimer l’hommmm is making a series of theatrical studies about our performance-prone society: “You will be yourself, you will distinguish yourself because of what you do and wear.” We paint a picture in three studies of how modern man has to fit himself into an identity in which success and self accomplishment are the basis (you get what you deserve), an identity that is so rigid and narrowly defined that it turns us into compulsive and indigent people.
Study #2 is a very minimalistic performance that, in its purity, tries to reach an essence. In this performance we focus on how our compulsive urge for self-realisation influences our relations. The performance confronts languages. While one of the performers tries to explain herself and fails in her attempts, another performer succeeds in really expressing himself with a purely physical language that is at first incomprehensible but throughout the performance manages to exceed understanding. When language fails and movement gets a clear direction, the possibility arises to really grow towards each other, not in signification but in physical recognition.
Director: Mats Van herreweghe – Cast: Geert Belpaeme & Yinka Kuitenbrouwer
With Freetimer l’hommmm is making a series of theatrical studies about our performance-prone society: “You will be yourself, you will distinguish yourself because of what you do and wear.” We paint a picture in three studies of how modern man has to fit himself into an identity in which success and self accomplishment are the basis (you get what you deserve), an identity that is so rigid and narrowly defined that it turns us into compulsive and indigent people.
In Study #1 (2011) a man goes on a job interview. He has brought a large stick.
By & with Mats Van Herreweghe & Geert Belpaeme
In Gat l’hommmm is looking for its own little revolution. To attain that, we have to go back to the beginning: the big bang that put the void out of balance. The result: bodies in an empty space, people who start to relate to each other, who discover and scan each other. The possibility of a world that arises and at the same time the expectation that everything can become something, that everyone has to be someone.
Director: Geert Belpaeme – Cast: Michaël Canto Minjauw, Seppe Cosyns, Lieselotte De Keyzer, Elien Hanselaer & Lize Pede – Dramaturg: Mats Van Herreweghe
In the garden of Eden
a cat jumped over the fence
and everything changed.
Three actors on a scène try to go back to the origin. They want to play. Without gravity, without embarrassment and without restraint they dance, move, play as little children. And, as when little chidren play, it does not matter that the game is shifting all the time.
They are liberated form everything that ties them in this world: society, language, themselves. Unconcernedly they search for their own paradise. But still that one question lingers:
Où est le chat?
Director: Geert Belpaeme – Cast: Michael Canto Minjauw, Sanne Haenen & Seppe Cosyns – Dramaturg: Mats Van Herreweghe – Designer: Sarah Geirnaert – Coaching: Elsie de Brauw, Sam Bogaerts & Alain Platel.
vimeo
booking
Geert Belpaeme is currently planning the creation of a new performance called Imaginary numbers, togehter with Estefanía Álvarez Ramírez. Première will be in 2025. We'll keep you Posted!
We count all the time: when we go to the shop, when we read the clock, when we dance, when we hold our breath to get rid of a hiccup. But also when we decide on the amount of asylum seekers we can take in or when we calculate the scope of a war or a natural disaster.
Imaginary numbers deals with the violence inherently present in counting: in calculating, encompassing, containing, excluding, making binary of a complex and multiple existence to make it fit into a stable worldview. We want to lift the stability of that counting from its hinges, both by disrupting the subject that counts, by offering the counting object a rebuttal, but also by derailing the numbers. For how tangible is that counting? How real are the numbers we count with? In quantum physics, mathematicians were found to need imaginary numbers to make the most fundamental calculations make sense. Our performance explores the imaginary numbers that interject our attempts to calculate our lives, desires and futures.
Imaginary numbers is a hybrid performance on the boundaries between dance, theatre and clowning that explores the critical potential of a contemporary clowning practice. This performance is a continued and intensified collaboration of theatre maker and performer Geert Belpaeme with dancer and choreographer Estefanía Álvarez Ramírez, who met during the creation of Please (don’t) let me be (mis)understood.
Imaginary numbers will premiere in September 2025.
What is playing and how does it relate to our authenticity as human beings? Playing supposes that you play a certain ‘role’ within a set of rules. Playing theatre even takes it a step further because there is the glance of a viewer that enters the situation and unbalances it, thus creating a new ‘language’.
Using as a working title Playfulness Geert Belpaeme is writing an essay that departs from his pedagogical practice at the drama department of KASK / School of Arts in Ghent. There he teaches drama students in there first Bachelor year within a series of abstract improvisation exercises how they can design their presence on a stage. They examine how their presence in a space can in different ways elicit content, meaning or communication. In Playfulness Geert approaches playing from the perspective of movement. This way he can examine an essence of the performing arts, before there is a text, a character, a choreography, a concept or an idea. Or as Peter Brook describes it at the begining of The empty space: “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”
Playfulness is financed by the research fund of KASK / School of Arts in Ghent.
A publication with a strong desire for being a line.
In 2017 Geert Belpaeme and Heleen Van Haegenborgh made First, a performance with a piano in the lead role. They were inspired by Tik Tak (an iconic Belgian tv program for todlers), Barnett Newman and String theory to reflect on the linearity of our consciousness. For their passage during Het Theaterfestival in 2018, they published the text and the score of the performance, designed by Oshin Albrecht.
Negotiating Realities is a research cluster at KASK in Ghent.
Negotiating Realities stimulates transdisciplinary research marked by an attempt to relate to the complex realities that surround us: a plurality of coexisting and overlapping phenomena. This array of realities is a dynamic given that needs to be performed, designed and maintained by a panoply of agents, human and non-human alike. With uncertainty at its heart, Negotiating Realities re-imagines futures, presents and pasts beyond normative constructs and scrutinises the unequal distribution of the powers at play in objects, technologies, narratives, attitudes and documents.
Reflecting light is a research project about light and about lighting design in the arts.
Light is everywhere. It reveals and shapes the world we live in. Everything we see, every colour, form or texture we perceive, the atmosphere of a space, even the mood we are in, it all depends upon light. In the arts as well, many (if not most) disciplines use light as part of their practice. However, the practice of applying light to a space (called lighting or lighting design) is rarely acknowledged as an essential signifier. It seems to be taken for granted. In a wide spectrum of artistic practices light paradoxically lacks its own visibility and the theoretical framework to be recognized as an agency that generates meanings. That is why Reflecting Light wishes to build and broaden a living discursive practice around lighting.
Read more about the project on the website of KASK
We regularly publish a zine on topics related to light and lighting design. All issues can be read and downloaded here.
The Reflecting light research group consists of Emese Csornai, Henri-Emmanuel Doublier, Jan Fedinger, Jan Maertens, Tomi Humalisto, Bruno Pocheron, Ezra Veldhuis, Bram Coeman & Geert Belpaeme.
Reflecting Light is financed by KASK in collaboration with art centre Buda (Kortrijk), HAUT (Kopenhagen), Madhouse (Helsinki), DASPA (Kopenhagen) and UniArts (Helsinki)
In All Inclusive, Julian Hetzel questions the aestheticization of violence and the explosive force of image wars. Exploring the principle of “creation through destruction”, Hetzel imported several kilos of debris from a conflict zone in Syria to central Europe. These remnants of the war have now been transformed into art.
All Inclusive juxtaposes art and war, tourists and refugees, reality and imagination in a journey through a temporary exhibition space. You are invited to watch a visit through a museum where reality strikes back. What if we could capitalize empathy by making people watch people?
director: Julian Hetzel / performers: Kristien De Proost, Edoardo Ripani, Geert Belpaeme & lokale figuranten / dramaturg: Miguel Angel Melgares / artistic advice: Sodja Lotker / costumes: Anne-Catherine Kunz / technical: Korneel Coessens & Piet Depoortere / production assistant: Sabine Mangeleer
production: CAMPO i.s.m. Stichting Ism&Heit Utrecht
coproduction: Frascati Producties, Schauspiel Leipzig, Münchner Kammerspiele & SPIELART Festival
In Matisklo Bosse Provoost and five other theatre makers look for the limits of what can be enounced and represented, guided by the poetry of Paul Celan, costumes that engulf a human being and heaps of animate material.
On the stage some ambiguous and introvert 'figures' pass by. Which spread jumps in meaning and imagination emerge when these figures and the poetry of Celan meet each other?
As survivor of the Holocaust Paul Celan morally and linguistically searches for the limits. His poetry reaches for what is 'beyond' language: a world that far precedes or passes by human beings, an urge to speak from ones own being-dead. Every word is like a stone picked up and looked at from multiple directions.
director: Bosse Provoost / performers: Joeri Happel, Benjamin Cools, Ezra Veldhuis & Geert Belpaeme / dramaturg: Geert Belpaeme / sound design: Benjamin cools / costume design: Max Pairon / scenography & lighting design: Ezra Veldhuis / text: Paul Celan / Dutch translation: Ton Naaijkens
production: Toneelhuis & Kraagsteen / coproduction: Vooruit, Jonge Harten Theaterfestival
‘My Life with the Tree’ is een visuele trip die de sluizen van je verbeelding wagenwijd openzet. Het is een ode aan het mooiste en tegelijk meest tragische mechanisme in de mens: het verlangen. Want iets willen: dat is wat het leven voedt en vooruit stuwt. Het laat je steeds opnieuw je horizonten verruimen. Maar hoeveel mag er sneuvelen om je droom te bereiken? En wat als je dan hebt wat je dacht te willen?
Geïnspireerd op de condition humaine volgens Schopenhauer, creëert de jonge theatermaker Alexia Leysen met acteur Geert Belpaeme een eigenzinnige wereld die schommelt tussen fantasie en hyperrealisme. Laat je meevoeren in een beeldende reis, langs de omwegen van de fantasie en met de poëzie van het antispektakel.
In Please (don’t) let me be (mis)understood three figures perform the intrinsic frenzy of being human. To do so, they revert to an old, almost extinct, tradition: clowning. Using the clown’s nonsensical language and wobbly body, with gleeful recklessness and frivolous pretence, they make their way through human history and beyond.
Please (don’t) let me be (mis)understood is a hybrid performance that moves in between clowning, dance and theatre, a performance in which human bodies step out of their banks to play non-human relationships as well. Everything with the clown’s wink.
concept & direction: Geert Belpaeme / performance & creation: Estefanía Álvarez Ramírez, Geert Belpaeme and Stanley Ollivier / battery: Wim Segers or Arno Grootaers / co-direction: Bosse Provoost / dramaturgical advice: Mats Van Herreweghe / lighting design: Geert Vanoorlé / costume design & scenography: Carly Rae Heathcote / productional support: Famke Dhondt
production: l’hommmm / coproduction: C-TAKT, STUK en VIERNULVIER / spreiding: Vincent Company / in collaboration with CC Blankenberge, CC Strombeek, Cultuurhuis de Warande, De Grote Post, Dommelhof, Kaaitheater, Nona en Miramiro / with the support of the Flemish government and Culture Ghent
Please (don’t) let me be (mis)understood went into premiere on the 14th of January 2023 in NONA (Mechelen), and was afterwards performed in CC Strombeek (Grimbergen), Monty (Antwerp), De Grote Post (Ostend), De Nieuwe Vorst (Tilburg), C-Mine (Genk), Theater op de Markt (Neerpelt), STUK (Leuven) and Campo (Gent).
Elephant in the Room is an ever changing performative act that questions how and why we look at animals and what it means to be human in that context.
In this project, Geert Belpaeme reworks material from his earlier creation The animals into short performances outside the theatre, inspired in this by his current research into a contemporary clowning practice. Each time, the performances are adapted to location, audience, context and atmosphere and take different forms, from installations and interventions in the public space to full-blown clown gag. So each time different, but each time on the alienating edge between humour, tragedy, social criticism and freedom and at the crossroads between dance, performance and mime.
Geert Belpaeme is a Belgian performing artist. He graduated in 2010 at the drama department of KASK in Ghent where he has ever since been involved as pedagogue and artistic researcher.
The materiality of the narration, the impulsive imagination of the performer and a search for non-linear and (more recently) posthuman dramaturgies, have been recurring themes in Geert's practice both as performer and as performance maker. His artistic language combines playfulness with philosophical rigour in performances that want to challenge the prevailing narrative structures of our society.
Between 2010 and 2020 he worked together with Mats Van Herreweghe and interchanging collaborators under the collective name l'hommmm, creating performances that balance on the boundary between theatre, dance and philoshical experiment. The work of l'hommmm is characterised by a playfulness and abstraction that starts from an uninhibited imagination. With every performance l'hommmm tried to create a new language, a new way of generating meaning and communicating with an audience.
From 2015 till 2018 Geert collaborated with Bosse Provoost, Kobe Chielens and Lieselotte De Keyzer under the collective name de polen to create the performances Herberg and The Act of Dying.
Since 2020, Geert's work has evolved towards clowning. In his ever hybrid practice, he currently focuses on the power and relevance of clowning as a contemporary practice. This is not about the reproduction of the figure of the clown, as it exists today, almost as an archetype, in our imagination, but about reviving a rich and complex performative practice that held an important place in society until the mid-20th century. The clown is for Geert a vessel to materialise human (and non-human) aggression, violence, absurdity, hopelessness. The clown is a post-human performer who, with an unseen playfulness, lifts our existence from its hinges.
Besides his work as a performing playwright, Geert has worked as a performer, coach and dramaturge with Bosse Provoost, Alexia Leysen, Alexander Vantournhout & Bauke Lievens, Circus Katoen, duo André-Leo, Sinking Sideways, Julian Hetzel...
PLEASE (DON'T) LET ME BE (MIS)UNDERSTOOD
Around About Circus, May 27th 2024
THE ANIMALS
Etcetera, 6 oktober 2020
FÜNF LEICHTE TANZSPIELE
Etcetera, 15 februari 2017
SPRACHSPIEL
Knack Focus, 1 april 2015
De Standaard, 26 februari 2015
FREETIMER -STUDY #2
Zone03, 28 oktober 2013
FREETIMER - STUDY #1
De Standaard, 2 augustus 2012
In October 2020, The Animals premiered, a performance that takes you to the zoo, a place where people watch animals. After the premiere, the performance went into forced hibernation. But a performance is a living organism that continues to grow, even when it is not played or seen. Be a Bear is the fever dream of a performance in hibernation.
Be a Bear is a Podcast by Geert Belpaeme and Esther Venrooy.
The Animals is a playful requiem for a dying ecosystem and a failing image of humanity. The performance takes you to the zoo, a performative space where animals are forced to perform their otherness so that humankind can confirm itself – by watching. Zoos engage visitors in an historic ritual of a Western ordering of the world, teaching them to “gaze” at creatures made to be exotic through our imagining wild and faraway places. But in this zoo the boundaries are blurred between who is human and who is animal. In this zoo it is unclear who should perform (for) whom.
“Animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance.” (John Berger, Why look at Animals?)
director: Geert Belpaeme / dramaturge: Bauke Lievens / performers: Greet Jacobs & Sophia Bauer / lighting design & scenography: Geert Vanoorlé / sound design: Esther Venrooy / masks: Viktor Leestmans / costume: Valerie Le Roy / technical support: Geeraard Respeel / artistic advice: Mats Van Herreweghe
production: l’hommmm / coproduction: Vooruit / Supported by the Flemish Government, Culture Ghent, Buda, De Grote Post & KAAP
Previously performed at Vooruit (Gent), De Grote Post (Oostende), Buda (Kortrijk), Malpertuis (Tielt), Nona (Mechelen), Tweetakt Festival (Utrecht)
First is a collaboration of Geert Belpaeme with pianist/composer Heleen Van Haegenborgh. They were inspired by Tik Tak (an iconic Belgian tv program for todlers), Barnett Newman and String theory to reflect on the linearity of our consciousness.
First starts off from the idea that we, human beings, are ourselves the creators of the reality we live in. First is a pamphlet: an ode to beginning; a prelude danced by the first man, for the last man.
First was rewarded with the Price Roel Verniers in 2016 and played at het TheaterFestival 2018 in Antwerp.
Geert Belpaeme (text, creation & performance) / Heleen Van Haegenborgh (music & performance) / Mats Van Herreweghe (dramaturgy) / Ezra Veldhuis & Bosse Provoost (scenography) / Geert Vanoorlé (light design)
a production by l’hommmm, with the support of KASK School of Arts Ghent, Vooruit, Pact Zollverein, wpZimmer, KAAP and the price Roel Verniers 2016 (TheaterFestival, t-heater & Circuit X)
First was performed at KC Nona (Mechelen), Het TheaterFestival (Antwerpen), Vooruit (Gent), Festival Dansand (Oostende)
In The Act of Dying three performers try to die as cheerful non-human figures. They are looking for the ultimate freedom of the animation figure: to rise up again after a downright violent death. The performance is a reflection on the role of violence and death in our society. By approaching death from the light and playfull perspective of the animation figure, de polen try to reach a veritable tragic. The performers are assisted by a square and by the Third Symphony by Henryk Górecki.
‘They don’t know death, they don’t know sexuality, they don’t know suffering, you cut them into pieces, they’re reconstituted. There is no finitude, no mortality here. There is evil, but a kind of naieve, good evil. You’re just egotistic, you want to eat, you want to hit the other, but there is no guilt proper.’ (uit A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema van Slavoj Žižek)
created and performed by: Bosse Provoost, Kobe Chielens, Lieselotte De Keyzer & Geert Belpaeme / scenography: Sibran Sampers & Ezra Veldhuis / dramaturgic advice: Mats Van Herreweghe / technical: Britt De Jonghe
productie: de polen
co-productie: wpZimmer, Buda, Vooruit & Toneelhuis
met de steun van: de Vlaamse Overheid, TAZ, LOD & KAAP
The Act of Dying was performed at Vooruit (Ghent), KAAP (Brugge), TAZ (Oostende), Festival Boulevard (‘s Hertogenbosch), Love at First Sight festival (Antwerpen), Jonge Harten Festival (Groningen)
Fünf leichte tanzspiele tells the story of language. Not the language that we speak but a primordial language, a game, an imagination that preceeds understanding. Fünf leichte tanzspiele reveals how quickly language erupts, how easily we understand what we cannot apprehend.
Language, maths, science are not attempts to apprehend reality, they are a game in which people try to order experience through self-invented rules. There is no logic, there is no truth, there are only plays and players, rules and the application of rules.
Fünf leichte tanzspiele takes you back to the serieusness of being a child, where every form has to be discovered, where content is still abstract and abstraction is very normal.
Created & performed by: Geert Belpaeme, Mats Van Herreweghe, Loes Carrette, Benjamin Cools & Seppe Decubber
Light design: Timme Afschrift
Hoe houdt een mens zich staande in een architectuur – een desolate vlakte onder een brug – die zich onverschillig opstelt tot de mens die zich erin begeeft en hem door haar afmetingen fijn drukt? Het sterkste teken dat een mens er kan geven is er zijn of er niet zijn. 1 en 0 zijn instrumenten om iets uit te drukken. Er zijn. Er niet zijn. En vervolgens leest de architectuur als een partituur van ongewone ontmoetingen.
Herberg werd in 2015 gemaakt voor een zeer specifieke ruimte onder een viaduct in Ledeberg (Gent) om tijdens zonsondergang gespeeld te worden.
Het uitgangspunt van de voorstelling is altijd geweest om naar de ruimte, meerbepaald een grote vlakte met pilaren en een ‘dak’, te luisteren en haar niet iets op te leggen, wat ons bracht tot het proberen hertalen van een architectuur tot partituur. Een ander belangrijk onderzoek in de voorstelling is het verkennen van de mogelijkheden van een speler/mens/lichaam om over grote afstanden of bij weinig licht iets te communiceren, en welke mogelijkheden de visuele barrière van een afstand of zonsondergang bieden voor wat je wil vertellen.
In 2016 werden we uitgenodigd door Toneelhuis om Herberg te hertalen naar een locatie in de omgeving van Antwerpen. Omdat de voorstelling zo locatiespecifiek is, heeft de uitdagende hertaling naar het viaduct van Merksem ons tot een andere voorstelling geleid met inhoudelijke en vormelijke accenten eigen aan de locatie.
created and performed by: Bosse Provoost, Kobe Chielens, Lieselotte De Keyzer, Britt Bakker, Midas De Saedeleir & Geert Belpaeme
Sprachspiel is a performance on the line between art and philosophical experiment. In Sprachspiel Geert Belpaeme and Mats Van Herreweghe want to show how communication emerges out of playing, not out of understanding.
The performance was inspired by the idea of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein that language does not need clear-cut concepts or unambiguous signification. It is not necessary for you and me to share predetermined concepts and rules to be able to communicate. Language is use: Meaning arises only when an action is performed. In Sprachspiel Mats Van Herreweghe and Geert Belpaeme examine how such a playful, active language could emerge.
Created & performed by Geert Belpaeme & Mats Van Herreweghe / coaching: Charlotte van den Eynde / light design: Timme Afschrift in collaboration with students KASKdrama
Sprachspiel was performed at CC Ghybe (Poperinge), KC Nona (Mechelen), Flare Festival (Manchester, UK), CC hasselt, De werf (Brugge), Love at First Sight (Antwerpen), MSK (Gent), Pact Zollverein (Essen, D), Chambre d’O (Oostende), wpZimmer (Antwerpen), Les Ballets C de la B (Gent), Rataplan (Antwerpen)
In It says nothing to me about my life l’hommmm explores how man and his body is socialised when growing up. How we stand, walk, laugh or cry is shown to us from when we are little children. Family and friends are a huge influence, but also the world outside and the abundance of images and information we get fired at us. The way in which we move in this world is not natural, it tells the story of every encounter in a human being’s life.
This performance is a search for sincerity in the multitude of information. How ever hard we try, we will never completely coincide with the images that we hold up to ourselves. And in that failing, a human being becomes his own, unique self.
Directors: Geert Belpaeme & Mats Van Herreweghe – Cast: Seppe Cosyns & Loes Carrette
With Freetimer l’hommmm is making a series of theatrical studies about our performance-prone society: “You will be yourself, you will distinguish yourself because of what you do and wear.” We paint a picture in three studies of how modern man has to fit himself into an identity in which success and self accomplishment are the basis (you get what you deserve), an identity that is so rigid and narrowly defined that it turns us into compulsive and indigent people.
Study #2 is a very minimalistic performance that, in its purity, tries to reach an essence. In this performance we focus on how our compulsive urge for self-realisation influences our relations. The performance confronts languages. While one of the performers tries to explain herself and fails in her attempts, another performer succeeds in really expressing himself with a purely physical language that is at first incomprehensible but throughout the performance manages to exceed understanding. When language fails and movement gets a clear direction, the possibility arises to really grow towards each other, not in signification but in physical recognition.
Director: Mats Van herreweghe – Cast: Geert Belpaeme & Yinka Kuitenbrouwer
With Freetimer l’hommmm is making a series of theatrical studies about our performance-prone society: “You will be yourself, you will distinguish yourself because of what you do and wear.” We paint a picture in three studies of how modern man has to fit himself into an identity in which success and self accomplishment are the basis (you get what you deserve), an identity that is so rigid and narrowly defined that it turns us into compulsive and indigent people.
In Study #1 (2011) a man goes on a job interview. He has brought a large stick.
By & with Mats Van Herreweghe & Geert Belpaeme
In Gat l’hommmm is looking for its own little revolution. To attain that, we have to go back to the beginning: the big bang that put the void out of balance. The result: bodies in an empty space, people who start to relate to each other, who discover and scan each other. The possibility of a world that arises and at the same time the expectation that everything can become something, that everyone has to be someone.
Director: Geert Belpaeme – Cast: Michaël Canto Minjauw, Seppe Cosyns, Lieselotte De Keyzer, Elien Hanselaer & Lize Pede – Dramaturg: Mats Van Herreweghe
In the garden of Eden
a cat jumped over the fence
and everything changed.
Three actors on a scène try to go back to the origin. They want to play. Without gravity, without embarrassment and without restraint they dance, move, play as little children. And, as when little chidren play, it does not matter that the game is shifting all the time.
They are liberated form everything that ties them in this world: society, language, themselves. Unconcernedly they search for their own paradise. But still that one question lingers:
Où est le chat?
Director: Geert Belpaeme – Cast: Michael Canto Minjauw, Sanne Haenen & Seppe Cosyns – Dramaturg: Mats Van Herreweghe – Designer: Sarah Geirnaert – Coaching: Elsie de Brauw, Sam Bogaerts & Alain Platel.
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