
FOUR MOVEMENTS. Four blind dates between dance and music
Four blind dates between dancers and musicians. Because “the meeting between music and dance is a love story.” (Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker)
Four Movements is a journey along four blind dates between dance and music. STUK invited four dancers and four musicians from different backgrounds, styles and ages and paired them in duos. Each dance-and-music duo is given five days to dive into the studio together and explore each other's interests and practices. The outcome: an improvisation-based performance in an allocated venue. This creates an interplay between dance, music and architecture. Expect electricity, because ‘the meeting between music and dance is a love story’, as Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker says.
PRACTICAL
➤ Friday 28.02 - 20:00
➤ Duration: +- 90’
➤ Start: STUK Studio (4th floor above STUKcafé)
➤ €16 / €12 (STUK card) / €8 (- 19 & KU Leuven Culture Card)
➤ Flexible setting: standing, pillows or stools
➤ The ateliers (Eric Thielemans & Mohamed Toukabri) are not accessible for wheelchair users, all other venues are.
Okkyung Lee & Georgia Vardarou
STUK Studio
The journey starts at the very top in the Studio with two exciting international artists: South Korean cellist Okkyung Lee and Greek choreographer Georgia Vardarou will engage with each other and the venue's open architecture and reverberant acoustics.
Lee is known for her expressive and gritty way performance, with influences from noise, improvisation, classical and Korean music. She has played from MoMA to the Venice Biennale, collaborating with luminaries such as Arca, Swans and Christian Marclay.
Vardarou settled in Brussels after studying at the dance school P.A.R.T.S. and worked with artists such as Salva Sanchis, Marc Vanrunxt and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker/Rosas. With her own work, including Phenomena and New Narratives, based on in-depth movement research, she has repeatedly appeared on STUK's stage in the past.
Natasha Pirard & Vincent Glowinski (Bonom)
STUK Labozaal
Next, we descend to the Labozaal, where composer Natasha Pirard and ‘image creator’ Vincent Glowinski will bring an audiovisual performance using movement, projection and sound.
Natasha Pirard is a Ghent-based composer and musicologist associated with the DEEWEE label of the Dewaele brothers (a.k.a. Soulwax). With Steve Reich as her biggest inspiration, she previously worked with analogue tapes, loops and phase shifting. Her music is hypnotic and repetitive.
Brussels-based Vincent Glowinski is best known to the general public as street artist Bonom, with his monumental and macabre murals in Brussels and Paris. But he equally developed a performance practice. He creates luminous shapes and patterns by capturing movements and converting them into projections: the so-called ‘human brush’ technique, which he brings to Leuven.
Eric Thielemans & Mohamed Toukabri
STUK Ateliers
Both Ateliers are played by one of our country's best percussionists, Eric Thielemans, and his equally versatile counterpart from the field of dance: Mohamed Toukabri.
As a drummer and musical free-thinker, Thielemans moves effortlessly between scenes, be it jazz, experimental music or indie rock. This is reflected in the numerous collaborations he has on his record: Laurie Anderson, Marshall Allan (Sun Ra), Chantal Acda, Oren Ambarchi, Mika Vaino and Charlemagne Palestine.
Mohamed Toukabri started breakdancing in the streets of Tunis at a young age. After studying in Tunisia, Paris and Brussels (P.A.R.T.S.), he danced in productions by a.o. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Rosas and Ula Sickle (in collaboration with Ictus), and others. He too shifts seemingly effortlessly between various artistic worlds. Toukabri creates his own work, including the recent The Power (Of) The Fragile: a simultaneously moving, funny and socially critical duet with his mother.
Adia Vanheerentals & Briana Ashley Stuart
STUKcafé
We close with fireworks on the STUKcafé's stage. Jazz saxophonist Adia Vanheerentals and ‘stepping’ artist Briana Ashley Stuart get down to business with rhythm and energy.
Antwerp-based saxophonist Adia Vanheerentals is one of the rising stars in Belgian jazz and free improvisation. She works with musicians such as Hendrik Lasure and Elisabeth Klinck, plays in ensembles such as Bodem and recently created music for Femke Gyselinck and Platform-K's dance performance Change of Plans (seen last season at STUK).
Detroit-born dancer, choreographer and entrepreneur Briana Ashley Stuart has lived in Brussels since 2017. She has a unique style that combines rhythmic ‘stepping’ (an Afro-American form of percussion, where the body is the instrument and hands, feet and voice create intricate rhythms) with a phenomenal stage presence. She has collaborated with artists such as Gorges Ocloo, Dalilla Hermans and Alexis Blake - and now Adia Vanheerentals and her whimsical saxophone playing.
Georgia Vardarou (Greece) graduated from the State School of Dance (Κ.Σ.Ο.Τ.) in Greece and then from P.A.R.T.S. in Belgium, with the support of the first scholarship from the Greek State Scholarships Foundation (Ι.Κ.Υ). As a professional dancer, she has worked with Salva Sanchis, Marc Vanrunxt, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker/Rosas, Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt, Albert Quesada and Quim Bigas.
As a choreographer, she is busy with personal movement, the content that it carries and the intersubjective perception when watching a body moving. She created the stage pieces Hardcore Research on Dance, Phenomena, New Narratives, Why should it be more desirable for green fireballs to exist than not?, and The moment she hovers over the ocean, amongst other pieces in various formats as well as collaborations. Her stage work has been presented at theaters and dance festivals all over Europe, including: Dance Umbrella/London (UK), ImpulsTanz/Vienna (AT), Julidans/ Amsterdam (NL), Onassis STEGI/Athens (GR), Athens & Epidaurus Festival/Athens (GR), Festival Sâlmon/ Barcelona (ES), Kaaitheater/ Brussels (BE), STUK/ Leuven (BE), Schouwburg/Amsterdam (NL), Festival la Democrazia del Corpo/ Florence (IT), Monty/Antwerp (BE), La Caldera/Barcelona (ES), Mercat de les Flors (ES), C-mine/Genk (BE), MDT/Stockholm (SE).
Georgia lived in Brussels for 13 years. In 2017 she relocated to Barcelona. She is a member of the faculty at the Eòlia Higher Center of Dramatic Art, Barcelona. Her work is produced by Kunst/Werk.
Okkyung Lee is a cellist, composer, and improviser who moves freely between artistic disciples and contingencies. Since 2000, she has worked in disparate contexts as a solo artist and collaborator with creators in a wide range of disciplines. A native of South Korea, Lee has taken a broad array of inspirations—including noise, improvisation, jazz, western classical, and her homeland's traditional and popular music—and used them to forge a highly distinctive approach. While Okkyung is probably known best for her improvisational work utilizing visceral extended techniques on her instrument, she has been creating various types of compositions and site-specific works, responding to its architecture, audience, or objects surrounding her, producing an immersive experience that also challenges the built-in hierarchy in traditional concert settings.
She has appeared on more than 30 albums, including her latest solo cello release 나를 (Na-Reul), Teum (The Silvery Slit) and critically acclaimed Yeo-Neun. She has collaborated with artists including Christian Marclay, Arca, Mark Fell, Marina Rosenfeld, Vijay Iyer, Arthur Jafa, Swans, and worked at festivals and venues including Time Spans Festival, MoMA, Venice Biennale, Rewire, Unsound, MOFO MONA, Wiener Festwochen, Borealis Festival, and Donaueschinger Musiktage.
Mohamed Toukabri is a (break)dancer and choreographer, born in Tunisia and based in Brussels He started breakdancing at 12 and danced as a child with Sybel Ballet Theatre (TN) led by Syheme Belkhodja (2002-2008). At 16, Mohamed studied in Paris at the International Academy of Dance and later returned to Tunisia to continue his studies at the Mediterranean Centre of Contemporary Dance. Between 2006 and 2008, he collaborated with choreographer Imed Jemaa on five productions. In 2008, he began his studies at P.A.R.T.S. Brussels and danced in Babel (2010) by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet. He was part of the Brussels Needcompany (2013-2018) and danced in the revival of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Zeitung (2012). In 2014, he performed in Sacré Printemps! by Chatcha Company (2014). He is also a part of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s more recent creations Nomad (2018) and the opera Alceste (at Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, 2019). Mohamed recently worked on the remake of the opera Shell Shock, A Requiem of War with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, composer Nicholas Lens and writer Nick Cave for the 100th Anniversary of the World War I at the Philharmonie de Paris (2018.) His first self-devised work The Upside Down Man (the son of the road) premiered in May 2018. His next work, The Power (of) The Fragile, is a duet with his mother and toured extensively.
Eric Thielemans is a multifaceted drummer and percussionist who keeps on pushing the borders and expanding conscious aural spaces and territories. He is known for solos such as a Snare is a Bell, Sprang, and Bata Baba Loka and collaborated with artists from the jazz, experimental and indie music scenes, such as Mika Vainio, Charlemagne Palestine, Oren Ambarchi, Chantal Acda, Billy Hart, Nico Dockx and Laurie Anderson. In 2014, after a year of artistic dialogue with Vaast Colson, he created the site-specific audio work Aural Mist at Stadslimiet in Antwerp. This work was released on Kesh Records in 2016. From 2018 to 2020, Thielemans was an associate researcher at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the Conservatory of Antwerp. Here he focused on exploring ‘in-between spaces’ and resonances; the connection between inner and outer realities. His book On Resonance: Scores, Notes & Conversations (2024) is a cumulative work that encompasses and surfaces the underlying currents within his life in and with music. Within r-e-s-o-n-a-n-c-e he investigates the everyday magic through conversations, note writing and score writing to invite as many souls as possible to experience and co-create the magic in the everyday.
In 2024, Thielemans worked on new releases, including a duo with Oren Ambarchi, a trio with Charlemagne Palestine and Oren Ambarchi, and a release with the jazz trio Cinema Paradiso for the Dutch label Challenge.
Vincent Glowinski, born in Paris, is a versatile visual and performance artist based in Brussels since 2006. Under the pseudonym Bonom, he gained recognition as a street artist , known for his large-scale paintings on the city's gables and facades. At the same time, he worked in workshops to develop plastic projects and live performances combining dance and drawing, in close partnership with live musicians. In addition to drawing and monumental painting, his plastic projects turn to sculpture, with skin and leather parchment as his materials of affection. His work adopts all these varied forms, creating a singular universe.
Natasha Pirard is a Ghent-based musicologist and composer. She studied Art Sciences and Musicology at the University of Ghent. Pirards fascination with the phase-shifting technique, introduced by composer Steve Reich, led her to study musicology and the composers’ influence remains tangible in her compositions. Inspired by his approach, Pirard explores the thin line of tonal and atonal frictions and explores the ability to create an interesting dialogue of continuous and interrupted tape loops. During her live performances, these concepts come to life as she manipulates tape loops, transforming them into musicians in their own right. Pirard's debut album Dream Cycles is a collection of four cassettes, each featuring a 15-minute composition on both sides, resulting in 120 minutes of music. Besides her musical career, Pirard also uses her background in music as a moderator during concert series or festivals with artists such as Suzanne Ciani, Felicia Atkinson and Jules Reidy.
Originally from Detroit (United States of America), Briana Ashley Stuart is a performing artist, dancer, choreographer and dance entrepreneur based in Brussels. She graduated from the University of Michigan with a BFA in dance and a BA in sociology. She has worked internationally as an independent artist and with a number of companies and artists, including StepAfrika!, SJEwing & Dancers, ZIKIT, 4Hoog kindertheater, Lila Magnin, Alexis Blake, Gorges Ocloo. She presented her latest work Moving Meditations, a multidisciplinary work about healing at KVS Brussels, which was the first step in her research into percussive dance and movement and sound in space. In her artistic work, she is interested in audience interaction, philosophy and the potential of the human body as an instrument of rhythm and expression. More about her artistic interests and works can be seen in her introspective dance lecture Stepping: Freedom in Form produced by BOZAR in Brussels, and more recently her dance lecture How to Unveil the Secret Power of Movement and Sound to Create at TEDxBrussels in 2023.
As a saxophonist, Adia Vanheerentals enjoys working in a variety of contexts. In recent years, she has formed jazz and improvisation bands such as Bodem, Waarlijk, and Vanheerentals/Beeckaert/Lasure, each challenging the audience's experience. Bodem is set to release a second album soon, followed by a tour across Flanders and Brussels. Additionally, Vanheerentals performs in Femke Gyselinck and Platform-K's dance production Change Of Plans and collaborates as a side musician in bands like Klinck Trio, Fanfaar Fatal, Jazz Ellendelingen, and Anais Vijgen Quintet. Recently, she has also been exploring improvised solo work, where whimsical melodies intertwine with decelerating breaths, as showcased on the album Here Are 5 Reasons to Meditate, released by Ultra Eczema.
CREDITS
performance Okkyung Lee & Georgia Vardarou, Natasha Pirard & Vincent Glowinski (Bonom), Eric Thielemans & Mohamed Toukabri, Adia Vanheerentals & Briana Ashley Stuart production STUK Thanks to Fintro
FOUR MOVEMENTS is a Performance Situation Room as part of Life Long Burning - Futures Lost and Found co-financed by the European Union.
Location
Price
€16 standard
€12 STUK card
€8 Culture Card / -19 years old