UUR KULTUUR XL: fABULEUS / Frankie / Vieze Meisje / Elise Eeraerts & Roberto Aparicio Ronda

Arts centre STUK opens the doors of the iconic nightclub Manhattan for an evening packed with dance, music and visual arts. Ghent-based collective Frankie throws concert, puppet theatre and live animation in the blender for a chaotic, funny and naïve trip. Then there is dance from Leuven's fABULEUS and choreographer Helder Seabra: Human Instruction Manual is a physical performance about body language and touch. Between the shows, you can enjoy the exhibition by Elise Eeraerts and Roberto Aparicio Ronda, who immerse you in a futuristic swamp landscape where fact and fiction collide. We end the night with a powerful aftershow by the phenomenal Vieze Meisje - because "Life is a Vieze Cirkel"!

• Frankie - L.I.A.R.
(concert/theatre - try-out)

What happens when you throw music, theatre and animation art together? You get the crazy concert performances of Frankie, the project of Brecht Hayen, Vincent Lynen and Simon Lynen. Since their performance Laguna Beach (2019), Frankie has created fragmentary tableaux with shrill guitars, lousy animated puppets, live video and crackling audio tapes. Their universe is messy and naive, but also cinematic, funny and touching. With their new performance L.I.A.R. the gang finds themselves in a self created lab centered on experimentation and observation. Different 'workers' operate analogue equipment, instruments and installations. They receive instructions from an omniscient voice and are assisted by a duck and a talking dog: a process in which the failures and the clashes, the misunderstandings and the discoveries are spotlighted.

• fABULEUS / Helder Seabra - Human Instruction Manual
(dance)

In less than a second we can connect with people on the other side of the world. Yet why is it often so difficult to make a connection with those people with whom we spend every day? Human Instruction Manual is an intense dance performance in which twelve youngsters move around each other, searching and touching. Driven by electronic dance music, they try to bridge the distance between one another. How do you decode someone else’s instruction manual? And how do you explain to the outside world how you fit together yourself?

Portuguese dancer/choreographer Helder Seabra was, as a dancer, one of the key figures in Ultima Vez and Eastman/Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. In the past years he developed his own performances nationally and internationally, among which with his own company Incognitus. For Human Instruction Manual he worked together with Natascha Pire, who has collaborated with fABULUES since 2002 for various successful dance productions, among which GIRLS and EVERLAND.

• Elise Eeraerts & Roberto Aparicio Ronda - And, like snakes, the roots of trees Coil themselves from rock and sand
(expo)

In their solo exhibition in Studio STUK Manhattan, artist duo Elise Eeraerts and Roberto Aparicio Ronda immerse you in the world of swamps and wetlands, where fables and facts intersect.

And, like snakes, the roots of trees
Coil themselves from rock and sand,
Stretching many a wondrous band
- fragment from Goethe’s Faust, when a wandering light (Ignis Fatuus) emerges in the story

Wandering lights and bog bodies, the swamp (bog) is often the symbolic setting for sinister events in both historical and contemporary stories; a place of mischief and mystery. At the same time, wetlands bustle with life and harbor a diverse ecosystem that plays an important role in the context of climate change as carbon sinks and storm buffers.

For their exhibition at STUK, Eeraerts and Aparicio Ronda developed a landscape of spatial and audiovisual elements inspired by the Kirkpatrick Marsh (MD, USA). In this marsh, scientists from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) are studying how plant and animal species respond to fluctuations in CO2, temperature, nitrogen (N) and sea level rise. Global climate changes are simulated there in anticipation of a new reality.

Awe-inspiring images of abundant fauna and flora in the wetlands cross with the excitement of fables and anxieties of science predicament in this thought-provoking installation that gets under your skin.

The exhibition is a co-production of STUK, i.c.w. Cas-co and with the support of the City of Leuven. The research was supported by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC through an Artist Research Fellowship from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) (2019 cohort).

• Vieze Meisje
(concert-afterparty)

Vieze Meisje is the duo consisting of performer-singer Maya Mertens and musician Azertyklavierwerke. She writes wayward poetry that is heartwarmingly honest, hilariously funny and brutally elegant, he composes acrobatic beats that bop all around the room. Together they create a bombastic dance feast centred around the collective cult of the 'Vieze Cirkel'. Their debut ep Life Is A Vieze Cirkel was recently released on Rotkat.