As the world unravels around us, bowing to brutality and war, it feels a huge, borderline guilty privilege to still be able to be part of an annual city-wide artsy vibe: the Kunstenfestivaldesarts (KFDA), or the kunst to those in the know. Brussels’ international festival of cutting-edge contemporary theatre, dance and performance, celebrating its 30th edition this year, continues to draw a large, discerning audience. State theatre auditoriums, lesser-known venues, pop-up and outdoor spaces all over the city are full to the brim for the entire three weeks of the festival. Tickets sell out within days, and last-minute swapping, wheedling and bartering for entrance to must-see performances is a habitual pre-festival pursuit. Late-night banter with friends fuelled by wine and strong opinions about just seen shows, and repeat, pre-matinée catch-up coffees with visiting colleagues, are all part of the ritual.
Since its inception in 1994 the kunst has had a consistent quest to offer a window on the wider world, exposing and exploring its complexities through its performance programme and associate workshops and lectures – and this year’s edition, the penultimate to be fully programmed and run by current directing duo Daniel Blanga Gubbay and Dries Douibi, was no exception. For me though, this laudable characteristic was conveyed in the dance programme not so much by human performers or their discourse, but by cascading kilometres of silk, mountains ranges made of tulle, eviscerated buildings as backdrops, and soundscapes evoking crackling fire, trickling water, rocky landslides and deep-sea ambient vibrations. Performance where the hierarchy between human and non-human seemed deliberately blurred, and where choreography was written by the surroundings as much as by the dancers’ bodies. Confessional, story-led performances, identity politics, individualism, seem to be making space for works that research relationships in nature, create communities and unpick the very fabric and functioning of our societies by immersing audiences in sensorial experiences.
The festival’s opening performance exemplified its hallmark artistic sophistication combined with socio-political savvy, whilst the setting added purposeful eloquence. Brussels’ Place de la Bourse is where the best and worst of the capital collide. More chaotic causeway than public square, ambling pedestrians narrowly avoid injury from swerving scooters and speeding electric Deliveroo bikes. The historic 19th-century stock exchange has been turned into a tourists’ beer museum, and aggressive redevelopment means façadism abounds: the shells of gutted buildings loom, warzone-like. But it’s also a city centre that, against the odds, continues to resist gentrification. Rents are lower than in the posher peripheries, and several different migrant communities thrive.
It’s here, in front of a kunst congregation, captivated despite sweltering in the sun, that the performance Friends of Forsythe – a collaboration between William Forsythe and renowned LA-based urban dancer-choreographer Rauf ‘Rubberlegz’ Yasit – unfolded. The city setting, complete with whoops, yells and sirens, couldn’t reflect more sharply the work’s essence. Friends of Forsythe brings together performers from different dance disciplines and merges their techniques into ‘embodied language that connects dancers from all walks of life’. Melding different styles – urban, ballet, contemporary, folk – it echoes their legacies too. With cut-crystal Forsythe clarity, on a pristine white dance floor, six dancers, five men and one woman, dressed in sober black, slide seamlessly from threading to body waves, from popping to pirouettes. The group is multi-hued in technique and energy: Julia Weiss’s endless leg extensions explode like starbursts among the men’s more compact, weighted density; duos and trios form as if by effortless instinct. All notion of showmanship is absent, and the fluidity with which movement styles fuse allows us to see everything as a whole. The serene complicity of the dancers’ interactions, the harsh surrounding cityscape, the hazy heat and the passers-by occasionally pausing to peer, intrigued for a moment by the concentrated focus of the kunst audience – all these different, intertwined vistas meshed to become an abstract yet profoundly alive performance: the continuing genius of Forsythe’s work.
Brussels-based Louise Vanneste’s performance Mossy Eye Moor also evokes a kaleidoscopic landscape, but one inhabited by fictional and non-human beings. Fascinated by geological phenomena, Vanneste’s work is inspired and infused by notions of mineral and molecular metamorphosis, and how nature’s minute yet stealthy movements affect us and our world. These ideas informed the improvisations and explorations with which the choreography was developed. The dancers’ different and sometimes opposing energies and body types demonstrate how the investigation of one element can yield very different qualities. Fire for example, is interior and smouldering in the case of Eli Mathieu Bustos’s pelvic gyrations, or flighty and flickering in the hand gestures of Alice Giuliani. Time seems to get lost as unisons form and unform like iron fillings, attracted and repelled by an inner force. The experience seems oddly soothing, a sensation enhanced by Cédric Dambrain’s soundtrack, parts of which could be described as eliciting an ASMR response in the listener. ‘Mossys,’ explains Vanneste after the show, are the performance’s fictional protagonists, and ‘they can be a body, an object, a sound…. The Mossys tell us about the visible, the invisible, about chaos, the order of things, they embody meetings, overlaps, transformations.’
Also Belgium-based, Miet Warlop is a choreographer, visual artist and self-professed jack-of-all-trades; her work often finds its starting point from objects. In INHALE DELIRIUM EXHALE reams and reams – or more precisely six kilometres – of silk tumble from the flies, wind themselves around the six performers or engulf them like clouds. With no specific meaning assigned, anxiety and overwhelm seem to resonate throughout the work. Tension and suspension are also built up by the apprehension that the dancers are barely able to keep up with the machinery that they must manipulate to keep the silk flowing, or stop it swamping them. At some moments, rolls plummet heavily to the floor, missing a dancer by a hair’s breadth. But the metaphors within the work are neither overt nor static. At one point the dancers open their black anoraks and rezip them to enfold multicoloured silk drapes in each: crucifixion? National flags? Loving ‘self-hugs’? The thrill of the work is in the convergence of bodies, material and machines, and in the huge canvases that these floods of moving silk create for our imagination to fill.
Another work that toyed with perception, allowing us to ‘see’ with our ears, was Ann Veronica Janssens’ 50km of atmosphere to give a deep blue. Janssens, a reputed Belgian visual artist who has frequently worked with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, is best known for her coloured fog installations through which the public can wander. Commissioned by the kunst to create a performance for a seated public, Janssens opted to use only words and sound. An actor, Léone Françoise Janssens (Ann Veronica Janssens’ daughter and artistic accomplice), reads out the technical riders, installation manuals and presentation plaques that Janssens has written for her exhibitions over the last four decades, including descriptions of the virtually weightless thermochromic vapours that she uses for her colour-shifting canvases. These factual, neutrally delivered instructions and descriptions of desired effects are occasionally interrupted by fragments of poetry, or comments from other voices. Indeed, the title is borrowed from a long cosmic poem by science journalist, author and musician Alexander Wajnberg, entitled ‘8 minutes 19 seconds’ (the time it takes for light to travel from the surface of the sun to our eyes). It’s only towards the very end of the hour-long work, when we have been lulled into a peculiar half-hypnotised state, that a beam of light from the back of the stage slowly scans over us – a funnel of brightness that accentuates the surrounding black. As it approaches, it’s blinding but reassuringly directive, signalling the end of an aural experience through which I, at least, had the impression of having perceived the intangible. Perhaps more simply put, the experience was like being plunged into a book where the sounding of words in one’s head can conjure images more resonant and indelible than any visuals could.
The festival closed with the world première of Borda by Brazilian choreographer Lia Rodrigues. Beginning with the longest, most silent blackout that I’ve ever experienced in a theatre, it feels like slowly waking up but finding that the dream is just beginning. Gradually, shapes become discernible in the gloaming: mountains laced with white that could equally be the heavily breathing breasts of a giant bride. Incremental shifts and imperceptible unveilings make the landscape alters before our eyes, and once more enable our imaginations to design our own story — much as we do in dreams. Faces, parts of limbs, torsos, head and hands also emerge from the mound only to dissolve again into the living organic mass.
Borda is the last section of a trilogy, a continuation of Fúria from 2018 and Encantado from 2021. In Portuguese, borda refers to embroidery, decoration, but also to a border, the periphery, something that separates. Figuratvely, the word also means imagination, the ability to cross borders, to transcend. The work is also informed by Rodrigues’ experience of collaborating on Brussels 2024 Zinneke Parade (zinneke being Brussels slang for mongrel or stray dog) a city-wide, cultural initiative where for the last 25 years about 2500 participants each year invent and fabricate their own floats and costumes using recycled, found or pre-used material. Rodrigues’ piece also began with a riffling through the costumes of the previous 35 years of her performances, and putting them together in different orders and forms. ‘Creating this float for the parade,’ she explained in an interview, ‘allowed me to see in a new way how artistic work can intertwine with these very different realities, with each participant bringing to the work their own unique way of being and existing in the world.’
Borda will be touring extensively, so not too many spoilers here; suffice to say that the dancers do dance too, and the work shakes off the dreamlike quality of its beginning to build up into the most joyous, vigorously hopeful show I have witnessed in a long time.
Texture, textile, threads, fabric, fur, costumes and coverings seem, in the works that touched me, to be alive and loaded with meaning. The various materials’ tangible, enduring qualities bear witness to human endeavour, thought, diligence, and collective (often feminine) effort, redrawing a connection between past and present, beauty and utility. I’d like to imagine that their use, along with the physical, natural worlds, oblivious to the whims of human egocentricity that were evoked in other works, represent new artistic responses: salutary, abstract yet accessible, indicating an opening move away from the mounting chaos that our (societies’) supreme entitlement and self-interest has created. ●
08–30.05.2025 Brussels, Belgium