Physical theater, bodies rolling, colliding, striking with the emotional impact of their grips. Jumps, neck-breaking sprints, perilous climbs on stage, communicating a captivating sense of risk to the audience. And then a way of delivering, under the force of the overwhelming energy of dance, a thought filled with love for the arc of life, a journey between birth and death, between childhood, maturity, and old age. It’s a crowding of sensations and powerful images, allowing memory to stroll through the performances and films created by Wim Vandekeybus from the 1980s to today in Belgium with his remarkable company, Ultima Vez. Choreographer, filmmaker, performer, director, and photographer, Vandekeybus closes the Festival, in line with the historical tradition of Oriente Occidente of dedicating one of its most important appointments to an artist who has profoundly influenced the course of contemporary dance in recent decades.
Spiegel was born to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Ultima Vez in 2006. The title means "mirror" and is a journey through seven historical performances of the company, starting from the groundbreaking creation, *What the Body Does Not Remember* from 1987, up to Inasmuch as Life is borrowed... from 2000. “Spiegel – Vandekeybus explains – should be seen as a kind of dinner made with ingredients from the past. It starts with a refined appetizer, ends with a delightful dessert, and a liquor.” That unforgettable run in a circle throwing bricks is an exemplary picture of the risk that is the key to accessing Vandekeybus's unmistakable idiom. Not by chance, the mention of the Bessie Award in 1987 for What the Body Does Not Remember identified Vandekeybus’s ability to give vision to the “dangerous and combative landscape of dance.”
Spiegel is a work of one hour and twenty minutes, created from cutting and editing work done by Wim together with the dancers from 36 hours of material. A corpus that is not a collage, but responds to the desire to observe the movement language developed by Ultima Vez over the years. “Spiegel – says Vandekeybus – provides a perspective on the development of this language (...). While it is true that I have always worked on what I intended to communicate, in Spiegel I focused on the origins of movements, the moods, and the ideas from which they arise.”
In Spiegel, one can also breathe in reflections on the passage of time, so present in Inasmuch as Life is borrowed..., instinct and desire (In Spite of Wishing and Wanting), ambiguity and fear of fate (7 for a Secret never to be told). Music by David Byrne, Thierry De Mey, Pierre Mertens, Marc Ribot, and Peter Vermeersch offers an unmissable deep dive into the presence of the body on stage.
www.ultimavez.com
