TRACES

World premiere on the 8th of December 2019 in the context of Europalia Romania during December Dance in Concertgebouw Bruges. 

In his latest production entitled TRACES, Wim Vandekeybus follows the traces he has left. He looks back on the intuitions from whence his search began: to the drama of impulses and instincts; to the game of energies and intensities.

Fables were central to the performances of the last few years. Stories of civilisation and culture, of communities and conflicts, of words and laws. In TRACES Vandekeybus returns to the body, to the instinctive reaction, the now moment, the imaginary catastrophe, the immediate energy that formed the pulse of his first performances. Far from every sense romance and without nostalgia for heroic times. With attention to the modern, complex, chaotic and contingent reality of the body. A rediscovery of a simultaneously powerful and vulnerable vitality in a world of technological and ecological menace. How much nature still lives in mankind? How much animal? TRACES isn't about the outside world, about the culture that man has constructed.  It is a search for traces of nature that the body has forgotten. In moments of risk and danger, from intuitive decisions to survive.

TRACES is an emancipation from the stone labyrinth of city and civilisation. In the overwhelming Romanian nature, with Europe's last primeval forests, Vandekeybus searches for traces that are older than man and his memory. For ‘the inner story’, for the story that unfolds before or beyond language and can only be told in the pulses of dance and music.

Eleven dancers and five musicians. The music is written and now and then performed live by Marc Ribot (who wrote the music for Inasmuch as Life is Borrowed and Vandekeybus’ full-length film debut Galloping Mind) and Trixie Whitley (who was to be seen and heard in TrapTown).