Not to miss at Brigittines International Festival

The Brigittines International Festival is celebrating its 22nd edition this season. The theme that forms the common leitmotif throughout the programme is "La grâce et le désastre" or "Grace and Disaster". Here is our selection.

Under the management of director (and choreographer) Patrick Bonté, the performing arts festival has increasingly oriented itself towards dance, as is again very clear from this year's selection. The twelve shows featured on the programme from 19 August until 3 September are all dance productions or performances. The theme that forms the common leitmotif throughout the programme is "La grâce et le désastre" or "Grace and Disaster". There is certainly grace in Time Takes the Time Time Takes by the Catalan company GN | MC – the initials of choreographers Guy Nader and Maria Campos. Their five dancers move like a perpetuum mobile in a choreography that glides through space like an expanding wave and beats through time like a metronome. Along with the music and the light design, the compelling, unrelenting rhythm makes this one of the more accessible creations at the festival.
Time Takes the Time Time Takes
22 & 23/8, 20.30, Les Brigittines, www.brigittines.be

The programme of the Brigittines International Festival features a double bill: Vacuum by the Swiss Cie Philippe Saire and Fractale by the French Emmanuelle Vo-Dinh. Vacuum focuses on the bodies of the dancers Philippe Chosson and Pep Garrigues, who repeatedly disappear into and reappear from the darkness. Each time, the minimal lighting shifts to a different, small section of the bodies, which makes them appear as abstractions. The choreographer thus approaches the human body as a sculpture and refers to several famous paintings and photographs. In contrast to the deconstruction and reduction in Vacuum, Emmanuelle Vo-Dinh makes the bodies of her three dancers multiply and branch off in Fractale, which was previously shown at the festival in 2010. A fractal is a figure constructed of smaller parts that have the same form as the greater whole. Inspired by this mathematical blueprint of endless repetition, Vo-Dinh has created a delicate, sensitive choreography.
Vacuum
26/8, 19.00 & 27/8, 20.30, Les Brigittines, www.brigittines.be