The Weight of a Thought

Recommended by visual artist Hans Op de Beeck!

About the installation:
Elles Grzybek and Michael Lazic have developed a performative sound installation that enables the dancer to generate his or her own sounds. The dancer merges, as it were, with the musician.

Concept:
Does our way of thinking directly influence our footprint on this planet and our alienation from each other?
Are we aware that the weight of our thoughts threatens to fill the spaces between people—and everything that lives—with a desolate, decaying landscape?

About the dance:
Elles Grzybek dances an intimate 50-minute solo on a small reflective platform with an innovative moving tile in the middle that meticulously records her footprints. She moves cautiously through different scenes where she tries to translate the consequences of our collective thoughts into movement and sound. Every pressure, no matter how minimal, causes a vibration that races through the entire piece like a tsunami.

What Hans Op de Beeck writes about it:
One dancer, a small rectangular stage. Light and darkness. Sound.
‘The Weight of a Thought’ is an intense, emotionally charged dance solo that speaks of the endless alternation between construction and destruction, characteristic of our human species.
The solo is inspired by the principles of Japanese Butoh dance, which is characterised by its unconventional, surreal and anti-aesthetic movements, with a focus on the grotesque nature of our human condition.
Uniquely, the dancer creates all the movements on the spot and controls all the sounds ‘live’.

Dancers-choreographers Grzybek and Lazic developed this production out of their deep concern about our relationship with the world, with all living things, and how thoughts can seemingly effortlessly shift from the desire for a utopia to a dystopia. We are all potentially masters and slaves, perpetrators and victims. Can we still achieve catharsis from our struggle with conflicting thoughts and emotions?