Nomadics

Lisbeth Gruwez & Maarten Van Cauwenberghe

2023

In Nomadics, Voetvolk’s latest production, seven dancers explore how to lend a voice to nature. It is the place par excellence to unwind, but what do we give back? The performers depict how nature looks back at man and suffers their footsteps. They embody how she reclaims her place and retaliates. This is done from an inadequate – because human – but also infectious and whimsical imagination.

Nomadics allows dancers to become a (passing) raging landscape. Sometimes they are tree, sometimes they are grass. Sometimes they are rock or human. This constant transformation results in beauty as well as friction: there is tension in the air. But as physics shows us: friction eventually leads to warmth, deceleration or change. Or again: through the struggle, the dancers in Nomadics seek connection, both with nature and with each other. In the process, music is in strong symbiosis with dance, as always at Voetvolk. Maarten Van Cauwenberghe has recorded sounds during walks – footsteps, water, wind in the trees, highways… – and has turned them into environmental techno.

Before the show, the dancers take a kilometres-long walk, along with anyone from the audience who feels like joining them. The dancers appear at an agreed place and time and pick them up for a walk that is all about looking, experiencing and connecting with the landscape. From the stimuli and noise of the city to the tranquillity of the country. And back to the hustle and bustle. They end on stage, where the paths separate again, and the performance can begin. But the experience of the journey returns in intensified form.

 

 

 

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