Sideshow, 2019
A series of disguised figures, including a geisha, a clown, a mummy, bird people and cat women, appear and disappear against an abstract decor with multicoloured light, in an endless round dance which reminds of the medieval dance of death. In the cinematic images, recorded in stop motion with various performers, the artist returns to a few old favourites: theatre, silent film, masquerade, puppet theatre, circus, and cabaret. The parade is at once macabre, moving, terrifying and comical. One of the inspirations for the performers’ slow, swaying movements was the Japanese ‘butoh’ dance, also known as the ‘dance of death and disease’, which arose in the 1950s in the wake of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but images of the medieval dance macabre were just as revealing.
Yet you gradually begin to realise that the issues she raises touch on the very essence of human existence. The artist that she is, seems – just like the children and the the madmen – prefer innocently poetic answers, and in this she is reminiscent of the absurd theatre of Samuel Beckett. To enter Beckett’s sphere of influence is also to open the gates of hell.
(Jan Braet in Knack, 19 August 2020)
Who are they? Where did they come from? They come to show something, each and every one, like rascals escaping from their coffin. Their movements, which may sometimes resemble something, an action, clawing, scratching, pulling, or a gesture, dismay, bewilderment, embarrassment, a gesture once seen on the street, on stage, in a film, are nevertheless theirs, as private as their disguise. What did I care about what they were expressing with their body movements, I only wanted to watch: to see how they did it, in that costume, in that body, moving. So many ways of moving from knees, hips, spine, neck, shoulders, elbows, wrists and knuckles, torso, head, arms, hands and fingers! Patterns of movement, one after the other, fill the screen, registered physical movements, silent film, but really wordless.
Eveline Vanfraussen in Hart Magazine 206, September 2020)