On Sunday, young and old are welcome once again in the park in Vorst/Forest, where the free children’s festival SuperVliegSuperMouche rings in the summer with more than sixty different shows and workshops.
The programme includes a number of international productions, but the emphasis is mainly on local shows and activities, ranging from musical acts to dance performances, acrobatics, open-air theatre, a mini-cinema, printing and photography workshops with music, and lots and lots of visual-arts stuff. Children of all ages are welcome – there is even a baby zone for tots.
SuperVliegSuperMouche was launched in 2011 as a joint initiative of the boroughs of Vorst/Forest and Sint-Gillis/Saint-Gilles. It is the work of a broad partnership of more than thirty Brussels organisations, including the Pianofabriek and Ten Weyngaert local Flemish community centres, the Brass and Jacques Franck cultural centres, and the Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, from where the festival is coordinated. The festival director, Benoit De Wael, describes SuperVliegSuperMouche as a “sustainable active-participation festival with an eye for the multidisciplinary, the surprising, and even the experimental.” Roughly half of the activities are workshops or shows that rely on interaction with the audience. In all cases, however, professional artists oversee the artistic quality of what is on offer.
This edition, the fourth, is packed with new material, with lots of new productions and installations that have been created specially for the festival and that have emerged from the activities of the local partners. As De Wael explains, “We started by launching an appeal for shows and workshops in situ. From eighty submissions received, we selected twenty, including some from young local artists. This year, the day of the festival will also mark the culmination of, and will offer a chance to see, the twelve preliminary projects we set up in order to increase local involvement by both French-speakers and Dutch-speakers, both in schools and elsewhere – including the prison in Sint-Gillis/Saint-Gilles.”
“In these projects, by analogy with the Zinneke Parade, we aim to develop social cohesion and try to reinforce each other. This season, for example, we have also reached out to a thousand schoolchildren, via artistic workshops that have led to productions for the festival. Karuselo Rakonto, for example, a real merry-go-round, built for and by children. Smaller children made up stories; bigger children built models to go with them, and we got together with parents and children during the Easter holidays to make the figures for the merry-go-round. That ‘story carousel’ will, by the way, be seen at other festivals later.”
Fathers in prison
The project with the prison resulted in Sst papa vertelt/raconte. “Fathers in prison wrote stories themselves or read them out. They were recorded and, using Aurélie Brunet’s Banc Publik, they were combined to create an installation for listening to, which will also be used later in the waiting room in the prison.”
This year’s SuperVliegSuperMouche also includes some well-known figures: Brussels-based endewolf presents a colourful theatrical show for young people, Gerrrrrrrda, while Mucyclo, presented by Cie LesLuisons, is a poetic contemporary dance show involving bikes. P.A.R.T.S. is backing the festival by staging a major show, featuring forty dancers: David Zambrano’s Passing Through, which can be seen on the panoramic Lainé square in the nearby Duden park. As well as major productions like those, there are also a number of smaller, nomadic performances. Says De Wael, “The Vorst/Forest park is a real people’s park that is intensively used by residents from various backgrounds, all of whom we are trying to reach. There is no need to register in advance: anyone wandering around is sure to find something special.”
SUPERVLIEGSUPERMOUCHE
14/6, 10 > 19.00, Park van Vorst/parc de Forest, www.supervliegsupermouche.be
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