Hands do not touch your precious me
With Hands do not touch your precious Me - The mingled universes of Wim Vandekeybus, Charo Calvo & Olivier de Sagazan, Wim Vandekeybus creates a mythical tale of confrontation and transformation, light and darkness, death and rebirth. He collaborates with the composer Charo Calvo, eight dancers and – for the first time – with performer and visual artist Olivier de Sagazan. Together they create a world in which bodies balance like living, fleshly sculptures between the utopian and the gruesome, the powerful and the fragile.
Run time tba
Genre dance
Language Language no problem
Dutch opening night Sat October 15
Hands do not touch your precious me
The poetic, mysterious title is a verse taken from a hymn by the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna to the goddess Inanna. Of all the myths surrounding the goddess Inanna, her spectacular descent into the underworld is the most intriguing. Inanna is the divine embodiment of the paradoxes of human existence, and her deeds are a reflection of the tensions and contradictions that every person is forced to navigate in life. Inscribed on clay tablets in cuneiform over 4,000 years ago, these are some of humankind’s most ancient stories.
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Regardless of their different styles, the performances by both Wim Vandekeybus and Olivier de Sagazan balance on the line of what it means to be ‘body’ and ‘man’. Vandekeybus developed his movement language based on impulsive and instinctive reactions when confronted with situations of physical risk and danger. At the core of de Sagazan’s work is the transfiguration of the body and the face with clay and paint into a lump of anonymous flesh. Vandekeybus’ and de Sagazan’s exploration of human limits finds a musical echo in the material and physical texture of Charo Calvo’s electroacoustic music.
Reviews
Knack, Els Van Steenberghe
'With this performance, Wim Vandekeybus chucks a thousand-year-old myth directly into our laps. He does not force it upon us, but uses kilograms of clay, a brilliant soundscape and seven talented bundles of muscles who move almost faster than light to show how, like Inanna, every person and each people continuously struggle to be a different and preferably better version of themselves.'
Pzazz, Pieter T’Jonck
'All this messing around with clay penetrating every pore has something repulsive about it, like an intentional degeneration of everything that makes us human: face, body, posture, gender traits. Everything slips away into an amorphous matter. At the same time, it’s not difficult to imagine that an odd pleasure, a wild desire is associated with all that self-soiling, an unscrupulous subsiding of everything we have learned to avoid.'
Nieuwsblad, Magali Degrande
'The tension starts when one of the dancers, trembling with doubt, brings a cup of coffee to the underworld. From there, there is no turning back.'
Credits
direction & choreography Wim Vandekeybus
created with and performed by Olivier de Sagazan, Lieve Meeussen, Wim Vandekeybus, Maria Kolegova, Mufutau Yusuf, Borna Babic, Maureen Bator, Davide Belotti, Pieter Desmet en Anna Karenina Lambrechts
artistic creation with clay Olivier de Sagazan
music composed and produced by Charo Calvo
additional original music (red dance) Norbert Pflanzer
live camera Wim Vandekeybus
artistic assistant Margherita Scalise
dramaturgy Erwin Jans
costume design Isabelle Lhoas
assisted by Isabelle de Cannière
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accessories Cèline de Schepper
light design Wim Vandekeybus & Thomas Glorieux
sound engineer Christian Schröder
technical coordination & stage management Thomas Glorieux
assisted by Benjamin Verbrugge
production Ultima Vez
coproduction KVS Brussel, Teatro Comunale di Ferrara
with the support of Tax shelter of the Belgian federal government, Casa Kafka pictures tax shelter empowered by Belfius
Ultima Vez is supported by the Flemish authorities and the Flemish community commission of the brussels capital region
