So the Kunstenfestivaldesarts ended with us missing another performance. It was not the first one we missed this year. When you book nearly everything, as you can do if you have a festival pass, you tend to double book with events like mother's day or concerts that have higher priority. That's the way it goes.

My absolute favorite performance was by the Japanese theatre company called chelfitsch. You can read a nice review with some pictures on this blog . It was funny in an absurd way, totally stylish and slightly disturbing at the same time and it was composed on top of the music by John Cage, Coltrane, Stereolab and Tortoise. A great piece and I'm absolutely curious to see more from this theatre company. Apparently their classic is called Five Days In March and there is a small clip from that performance on youtube .

The most talked about piece was certainly Via Intolleranza by Christoph Schlingensief. Noone I believe was able to make heads or tails of the show. It was just a cacophony of images and pieces of text and pieces of music and it vaguely said something about our third world politics or about the imminent death of the performer. In a way I liked it because it was puzzling but in a way I hated it because it seemed too meta to me. People that are more knowledgeable than me have more elaborate opinions about it ( Wouter Hillaert or Liv Laveyne ).

Playful, beautiful, touching and hilarious. That's how to describe the Lone Twin Theatre's trilogy. We spent one sunny sunday inside watching the three performances in a row and didn't regret it a moment. If it wasn't from the beautiful terrace at the beursschouburg we might have listened in on the discussion afterwards with the director but we decided to enjoy the weather instead.

The prize for subtle poetic beauty should go to Lotte Van Den Berg with the performance Het Verdwalen In Kaart. It was so simple in its beauty it reminded me of that famous Sony Bravia commercial . What Sony does with bouncing balls is what Lotte Van Den Berg does with amateur actors of the village of Dordrecht who become in their colorful carnival outfits individual elements of a bigger, beautiful picture. Combine that with a warm welcome through the backstage of the KVS and an equally warm farewell with drinks included and you get that nice fuzzy feeling. Here is a review by Els Van Steenberghe .

Something similar happened in Pororoca by the Brazilian Lia Rodrigues where a dozen of dancers, also in colorful outfits, form a larger body, almost like that of a large insect, that looks like it is crawling on stage until it takes the exit after crawling its way through the public to the front door of the theatre.

The least subtle performance was Hard To Be A God, by the Hungarian Kornél Mundruczó ( review by Guido Lauwaert here ). Dealing with the issue of human trafficking while showing on stage rape and murder is hammering the point home with a heavy brick. It did manage to pick up on a golden oldie though and I've been listening to it ever since:

Through freaky.be I was introduced to Bonom, a Brussels graffiti artist. Turned out he did a performance in the KVS and it fitted perfectly with the two other plays we had scheduled for that friday night. What happened basically was that he used his body and an infrared camera (I think) hanging on the ceiling of the room to paint pictures on a large screen in front of us. I will look out for his works in the streets of the city I'll be living in from tomorrow on.