THURSDAY, March 28, 2024
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A day in the life of 'Booty Looting'

A day in the life of 'Booty Looting'

A Belgian choreographer reminds us how different genres of art steal from one another

Visiting Paris is no longer about sightseeing, museum hopping, enjoying French gastronomy and catching up with friends who used to live in Thailand. 
   These days, my trips to the City of Light inevitably involve checking out the programme of the Theatre de la Ville, centrally located on top of Chatelet station, which has a tradition of bringing dance, theatre and music performances from all over the world to its stage.
   On a recent visit to attend the Societe Francaise Shakespeare’s conference, I was once again lucky, as Brussels-based company Ultima Vez, led by choreographer, dancer, film director and actor Wim Vandekeybus, was presenting “Booty Looting”, a piece that premiered at the Dance Biennale of Venice in 2012.
   Merging not only dance and theatre but also truth and fiction as well as art and life, “Booty Looting” featured four dancers, actor Jerry Killick and actress Birgit Walker whose partly fictionalised character of the same name is at the core of the performance. 
   Killick frequently narrated like a storyteller and occasionally commented on, like a director or a critic, Walter’s stories. He did this with various degrees of imagination and fabrication, referencing some of them to the Greek myth of “Medea” while simple props were quickly set up on stage, setting the scenes for a film shoot and a reality TV show, among others. 
   Multi-instrumentalist musician Elko Blijweert was always present downstage left and his original composition both underscored and led the stage action. Photographer Danny Willems roamed the stage at will with his camera. Many stills of the stage action were flashed on to a screen upstage a mere split of second after he hit the shutter, with the audience deciding for itself whether to focus on his frozen and framed image of the recent past in close-up or to watch the present stage action in long shot.
   In the programme, Vandekeybus notes that “Memories are often created or distorted on the basis of photographs. Proust once accused the visual memory of actually erasing memories.          Taste and touch are much more sensitive, but the visual is dominant. Which is why you can perfectly well remember things you have never experienced, simply because you have seen pictures of them.” 
   He also said in an interview with a Belgian culture magazine Staalkaart, “A harsh event can suddenly make something ugly that you used to find beautiful – and suddenly a good memory becomes a bad memory.” 
   His “Booty Looting” clearly demonstrated the truth of these points.
   The performance offered more than two hours of smooth blends and fiery clashes of images, sounds, body movements, spoken words and stories, all of which directly connected with the audience.
   For any member of the audience who had completed a hard day at work, it was probably an exhausting evening. Most would however agree that “Booty” was a riveting depiction of our highly mediated and multi-layered contemporary world. 
   It also provided a fond reminder not only that are art genres closely linked and thus continuously interacting with one another, but that today we also learn about another’s daily lives and personal stories from looking at their photos – elected, Photoshopped and curated – on the social networks rather than by talking to them in person. 
   I found myself also thinking of how, for many of us, watching a film or a stage performance, today relies on the streamed, legally or not, file on the screen of a tablet or notebook computer, making it an individual experience rather than a communal one in cinemas and theatres.
   Over the past few years, I have seen memorable contemporary dance and theatre works by Belgian choreographers and directors, among them Jan Farbe, Lisbeth Gruwez, Antoine Defoort and Halory Goerger – not only in Europe but also in Asia. So when, I wonder, now that we have direct flights between Brussels to Bangkok, will we be able to enjoy these fine Belgian treats?
 
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