EXIT 11: Those daring young...

This year sees the Halles de Schaerbeek get together once again with the Ecole Supérieure des Arts du Cirque (ESAC) for EXIT 11, a show that presents ten acts by fourteen students who are completing their training. This edition of the event, designed to highlight the circus talent of tomorrow, will be a particularly airborne one. Following Sorties 8, 9, and 10, the ESAC has launched EXIT 11 as a kind of final flourish to mark the end of a three-year apprenticeship. This is a major challenge for these young artists at the threshold of a career: an opportunity to show off their work, face to face with an audience in a professional setting for the first time. The pupils take to the air for this eleventh edition in a show that includes two aerial silk acts, a flying trapeze, an aerial cradle, and a climbing rope. Amaury Vanderborght, who will present his climbing rope project, expects a lot of the Halles event. He developed his own act on the basis of movement and acrobatics; he describes it as evoking “those photographs of the 1930s showing men who build skyscrapers having a picnic hundreds of metres up”. We meet him in the middle of his daily routine, warming up, performing his rituals, resin on his hands. The students, he tells us, are delighted to be performing in such a prestigious venue and are looking forward impatiently to the audience’s reaction; they all dream of “finding work afterwards”. Past experience suggests that the high level of technical and artistic mastery developed by the ESAC promises a high-flying future for these young people.
(© Antoinette Chaudron)

Exit 11 23 > 30/6, 20.30, 1/7, 15.00, €10/14, Hallen van Schaarbeek/Halles de Schaerbeek, Koninklijke Sint-Mariastraat 22A rue Royale Sainte-Marie, Schaarbeek/Schaerbeek, 02-218.21.07, www.halles.be