Geert Belpaeme - Imaginary numbers

Imaginary numbers is a hybrid performance on the boundaries between dance, theatre and clowning that explores the critical potential of a contemporary clowning practice. This performance is a continued and intensified collaboration of Geert Belpaeme with dancer and choreographer Estefanía Álvarez Ramírez, who previously collaborated in Geert’s latest piece, Please (don’t) let me be (mis)understood.

Imaginary numbers deals with the violence inherently present in counting: in calculating, encompassing, containing, excluding, making binary of a complex and multiple existence to make it fit into a stable worldview. We want to lift the stability of that counting from its hinges, both by disrupting the subject that counts, by offering the counting object a rebuttal, but also by derailing the numbers. For how tangible is that counting? How real are the numbers we count with? In quantum physics, mathematicians were found to need imaginary numbers to make the most fundamental calculations make sense. Our performance explores the imaginary numbers that interject our attempts to calculate our lives, desires and futures.

TEAM / CREDITS

Concept & direction: Geert Belpaeme
Creation & performance: Geert Belpaeme & Estefanía Álvarez Ramírez
Dramaturgy: Marie Peeters
Visual direction: Bosse Provoost
Performance coach: Piero Ramella
Lighting design: Ezra Veldhuis
Costume design: Sofie Durnez
Decor building: Geeraard Respeel
Circus coach: Raff Pringuet

Geert Belpaeme is a Belgian performing artist. He graduated in 2010 at the drama department of KASK in Ghent where he has ever since been involved as pedagogue and artistic researcher. The materiality of the narration, the impulsive imagination of the performer and a search for non-linear and (more recently) posthuman dramaturgies, have been recurring themes in Geert's practice both as performer and as performance maker. His artistic language combines playfulness with philosophical rigour in performances that want to challenge the prevailing narrative structures of our society.

Starting with his latest piece, Please (don’t) let me be (mis)understood, Geert's work has evolved towards clowning. In his ever hybrid practice, he currently focuses on the power and relevance of clowning as a contemporary practice. This is not about the reproduction of the figure of the clown, as it exists today, almost as an archetype, in our imagination, but about reviving a rich and complex performative practice that held an important place in society until the mid-20th century. The clown is for Geert a vessel to materialise human (and non-human) aggression, violence, absurdity, hopelessness.