Playground

The artists in this year’s festival:
Alex Cecchetti / Alex Reynolds / Anna Barham / Benjamin Verdonck / Dora Garcia / Emily Mast / Hugo Roelandt / Israel Galván, Pedro G. Romero  & Filiep Tacq / Lisa Vereertbrugghen / Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard / Marge Monko / Mary Reid Kelley / Marnie Slater / Michael Portnoy / Nástio Mosquito / Paul Hendrikse / Sarah van Lamsweerde

Since 2007, Playground has been a meeting point for the performing arts and visual arts. Artists freely combine elements from installation, text, film, sculpture, architecture and choreography in their practice, bringing objects and bodies together in challenging live performances.

For this tenth edition, the STUK Arts Centre and museum M are once more presenting several premieres, co-productions and collaborations. Some of the performances staged during Playground look for unique ways to translate texts, situations or experiences to a live event. In Anna Barham’s live reading groups, meaning proliferates from the physical surface of language, the sound, rhythm and cadence of the voice. The videos by Emily Mast are based on personal texts written by the artist that were translated into gestures. They examine how moment becomes memory, and memory becomes a fragile "fact." On the opening night, Marnie Slater will present By Written I Mean Made, a performance that is inspired by the notes of French artist Claude Cahun and presents text in a stylized setting. One more thing by Benjamin Verdonck is based on a line from Il diavolo sulle colline. He uses passing letters to assemble a graphic abstract fantasy about the relativity of things.

Elma is a site-specific work made by Alex Reynolds for the galleries at museum M. The visitor experiences the space through a story that presents a museum employee as the protagonist of the story. Alex Cecchetti’s performance Tamam Shud is an alternative tour featuring storytelling, stand-up comedy and opera. Cecchetti wanders through the museum looking for his identity. Also presented at the museum galleries is new work by Paul Hendrikse: Procedures For Undergound. This movement archive consists of a short series of politically, socially or normatively "invisible" attitudes. In Marge Monko’s Don’t Wind it up, Turn it on, two actors re-enact the compositions of hands used in advertisements. With a re-enactment of Hugo Roelandts Aeromatic Art Project I from 1983, Playground is focussing on the artist’s live-action work. M also presents Dora García’s El helicopter (jaartal) the first chapter of her recent film trilogy.

In addition to her show at M, Mary Reid Kelley presents her new performance This is Offal at STUK, her first work for a live audience, produced by Playground and commissioned by Corpus. The performance is an existentialist, feminist horror story, brimming with macabre wordplay enacting Camus’ philosophy of the absurd as a counter to suicide.

Artist and curator Pedro G. Romero, artists’ book designer Filiep Tacq and the well-known flamenco dancer Israel Galván will present a performance based on the work of Mallarmé and Marcel Broodthaers. After his absurdist game show 27 Gnosis in 2013, Michael Portnoy is presenting his new performance Relational Stalinism—The Musical to Playground. Portnoy’s alchemical manipulation of language and movement, interspersed with satire of the current state of performance within the visual arts, results in healthy and humorous confusion. Young artist Lisa Vereertbruggen explores the mutability of the body, identity and our surroundings, and reaffirms processes of permeability and porosity. In For Claude Shannon, artists Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard explore how movement can be turned into language. The performance uses grammatical dependencies between words in a statement from computer science pioneer Claude Elwood Shannon. The work of Nástio Mosquito revolves around the incredible potential of language. In this compelling and visually powerful new performance he combines video, music and live performance to reinforce his eloquent anger. Cast witnesses attempt to relate to replicas of Greco-Roman statues. With tactile and textual interactions, two mediators will guide visitors along their replicated and ruined counterparts in a performative experience by the artist Sarah van Lamsweerde.

Playground is curated by Eva Wittocx and Steven Vandervelden.

For information and tickets, visit www.playgroundfestival.be.

Mary Reid Kelley's This is Offal, Israel Galván, Pedro G. Romero & Filiep Tacq's Una tirada de dados and Nástio Mosquito's performance have been developed within the framework of Corpus. Playground is part of Corpus, network for performance practice. Corpus is Bulegoa z/b (Bilbao), CAC (Vilnius), KW (Berlin), If I Can’t Dance (Amsterdam), Playground (STUK & M, Leuven), and Tate Modern (London).

corpus-network.org

Corpus is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.