Puur

Wim Vandedeybus started as a photographer then became a performer working with Jan Fabre. He made his mark right away with the intensity of his dancing in his first piece called What the Body Does Not Remember (1987). Since then, instinct, speed, sharp impulses through the body radiate his shows with a feeling of urgency. Movements are eruptive, punctuated with abrupt élans, rolling, tumbling in space. It is a dynamic matter, a motor which he opposes, mixes or fuses with other components in his creations. He makes particular use of film which he most often shoots himself and which constitutes an important area of his research. Projected onto the stage, the films become a mysterious kind of skin, a permeable frontier between two worlds, real and imaginary. He had the music composed by musicians like David Byrnes, the ex-lead of the group Talking Heads for In Spite of Wishing and Wanting (1999), David Eugene Edwards of Woven Hand for Blush (2002). The music is interspersed with other sound arrangements which amplify physical and rhythmic perception of the body's sensations, and is an essential environment for his performances made out of dreams and fiction. Like, in Blush (2002) where eroticism stirs the bodies which are sunk on the edges of the sur-natural, this Belgian choreographer incessantly hunts for a secret meaning inside gesture. In his pieces – whose choreography bears a flow of fleeting images – actors and dancers seem to surf over the crest of hidden feelings. The piece becomes an unforgiving range of sensations, violent and gentle, goes through the bodies, bolts tight movement, and outlines a point a view which calls human-ness into question as well as the laws of desire and the community. At the Avignon Festival, Wim Vandekeybus presented Le Poids de la Main in 1990 and It in 2002.


Transformed by projected images, under the fleeting elans of dance, haunted by strange characters hit one after the other by salvos of text, the Carrière de Boulbon, a quarry, becomes quite another space. The performers vibrate with an intense, joyful energy and are invested with a strange power that enables them to cross space and time, to be at one time on stage and on the screen. Puur (Pure) is a story of fiction out of Wim Vandekeybus' imagination, with texts by P. F. Thomèse. It is the shifting epic, none other than that of humankind since the beginning of time. It is the history of our fundamental fears, strange spiralling paths down which we are led by desire, tricks played by collective memory that has a tendancy to forget, yet is creative. As in legends, something terrible has happened, but we don't know what. The story begins after the catastrophe. What remains is the impact that it has left on bodies and on minds. This show, places an isolated community on stage, and as if in a dream, it is the dead who speak. With today's words. Beyond human passions, they can examine violence, pain, guilt, they can try to remember and perhaps even to understand. Puur sets out to reveal, to unravel, to thwart, all that holds people back from being open to the world. Reflections thrown back from images, theatre, song and dance which, with humour, crush any attempts at alienation. A monumental demonstration of a hybrid world of interaction where the truth of the body and of nature nourish the poetic side of the choreographer, "to make visible emotions of the flesh on stage."

direction, choreography, scenography : Wim Vandekeybus
created with and performed by : Laura Arís, Tone Brulin, Elena Fokina, Robert M. Hayden, Krijn Hermans, Milan Herich, Germán Jauregui Allue, Jorge Jauregui Allue, Linda Kapetanea, Thi-Mai Nguyen, Manuel Ronda, Helder Seabra, Won-Myeong Won
original music : David Eugene, Edwards Fausto Romitelli
Texts : P.F. Thomèse & Ultima Vez
Dramaturg : Titus Muizelaar
Assistant movements : Inaki Azpillaga
Wim Vandekeybus' assistant : Greet Van Poeck
lighting : Ralf Nonn, Wim Vandekeybus
Sound : Benjamin Dandoy, Josh Martin
Costumes and styling : Isabelle Lhoas, Frédéric Denis
Fim realisation and scenario : Wim Vandekeybus
Director of photography : Lieven van Baelen
Cut : Dieter Diependaele

Avec le soutien : de la Communauté flamande et du Ministre de la Culture Bert Anciaux
En compagnie : de l'Adami
Production : Ultima Vez & KVS (Bruxelles)
En Coproduction : avec le Festival d'Avignon, PACTZollverein/Choreographisches Zentrum NRW (Essen), le Théâtre de la Ville-Paris, Singapore Arts Festival (Singapour), Cankarjev Dom (Ljubljana)
Avec l'aide : du Programme culture 2000 de l'Union européenne
Avec la collaboration : de la Commission Communautaire flamande et de la Région Bruxelles-Capitale et de la SACD Belgique