Le Monde wrote that it is “a moving play, that captures the essence of life and its infinite variations”; according to the New York Times, it is “noisy, absurd and incredibly entertaining”. It is ONE SONG – HISTOIRE(S) DU THÉÂTRE IV, by the visual artist Miet Warlop, the fourth in the series of “theatrical stories” that, in collaboration with NTGent, the director Milo Rau commissioned initially from himself and then from Faustin Linyekula, Angélica Liddell a Warlop, drawing cues from the question: “What is your story as a theatrical artist?”
Warlop’s answer takes the form of a performance in which the present, past and future come together in a unique manner: a group of performers come down to the arena to perform a farewell ritual, a ritual of life and death, of hope and resurrection. Pouring with seat, burning every molecule of oxygen, singing, creating images and handling objects, they push their boundaries to the extreme. Together, they wage a battle against time, in an attempt to move beyond their – and our – weighted bodies.
In this new creation, Warlop – Belgian, born in 1978, working between Ghent and Brussels, who emerged on the international scene in 2004 – brings to the stage a significant part of his artistic and personal history. ONE SONG carries elements of previous works, from the concert-choreographic ritual of Ghost writer and the broken hand break (2018) to the invitation for a collective breath to overcome our fears that lies at the base of Fruits of labor (2016, a performance conceived as a “painkiller for the world”), or physical effort seen as a metaphor, a founding element of Warlop’s artistic work that began in 2005 with Sportband / afgetrainde klanken, a creation based on the desire to create a requiem for his dead brother.
Through the metaphor of a sports match-live concert, complete with commentator and cheerleaders, in ONE SONG, Warlop invites us to create a community and move beyond ourselves, allowing particularity to become universal and the personal to become collective. This is the ultimate meaning of ONE SONG; how a song can give meaning and sense to society as a whole. United through diversity.
Duration:
60’ without interval
Share
