Choreographer Isabelle Beernaert's latest production 'Naakt' was abruptly interrupted by the lockdown. To maintain contact with her loyal audience, Isabelle Beernaert reaches out via social media in a one-time livestream 'SQUARED'.
Emotion, creativity and inventiveness are characteristic of her personality. She allows herself to be interviewed, talks about the creative process and provides insight into her working method in which she places great importance on the emotional and intellectual aspects of her choreographies. True to her southern roots and temperament, she draws from observations and her own emotions and is not afraid of extremes: love versus hate, sensitive and icy, radical and no pretense and all gradations in between. She often chooses songs with a story, a story that she brings back to life with depth and detailed execution in her highly personal and passionate way. Often she does this breathtakingly beautifully and movingly. Choreographies that her select group of dancers perform with heart and soul.
The title 'Naakt' (Nuda Veritas) does not so much refer to the naked body. Each dance fragment is a metaphor for feelings. We are all so conditioned and we march in step. Clothing is a form of disguise. We live behind a mask. We are inhibited in expressing our feelings. She illustrates this with fragments from the performance.
SQUARED is a teaser and arouses curiosity about the complete product. She highlights several diversified fragments with text and explanation. Unravels the make-off of her dance language. For example, she created a choreography to the song:
'La belle histore' Michel Fugain
The song represents the feeling of a young, in-love couple. Being in love is like a transcendent experience, a bubble, an intense moment. She works this out in an intimate, floating duet: gracious, pure and innocent. He is the yin, she is the yang. They wallow around each other in an exploration round. The choreography ends with a tender, fleeting kiss, for which she drew her inspiration from her favorite painting 'The Kiss' by Gustav Klimt.
'Halleluijah' Jeff Bukley
She chose Jeff Bukley's version because his voice grates more than Leonard Cohen's original version. This suits her well because in this number she wants to highlight the polarity between man and woman. Men often flaunt their toughness in macho behavior. Beernaert wants to show the man in his vulnerability. First he displays his physical and virile strength. When a woman appears on stage he becomes uncertain, wavers, shoots from sheer helplessness into an air pirouette. All external appearance shrivels up.
'Burning Fire' Trio Joubran and 'Porque' Yasmin Levi
Trio Joubran, consisting of three brothers, plays traditional Palestinian music. In that ethnic music, Isabelle Beernaert senses something of primal force, like birth energy. Again a metaphor for feelings. It becomes a kind of tribal dance from which she borrows patterns and techniques. The dancers in flowing red dresses move much from the hips. When the male dancers join in there is much swirling in the space like blazing fire and flames licking the ground. In everything the will, the lust to live rages. Followed by the piercing song 'Porque' by Israeli Yasmine Levy. It becomes a highly contrasting sensual pas de deux. There is suffering and a longing for tenderness and love.
'Clown' to music by Max Richter
In every person there is a light and a dark side. The male energy is formative, rationalizes. The weeping Pierrot is an outsider of society, he weeps, cramps, while there is so much beauty to see.
'Mesdames' Fabien Marcaud
In this number, a tribute is paid to all strong women, in whatever configuration: mistress, mother, lawyer, doctor… Isabelle Beernaert challenged her dancers. Placed a row of chairs on the stage and gave some dancers, including her daughter Manon Beernaert, the freedom to come up with a choreography for it. It became an intriguing spectacle. Women often have to change chairs to realize everything expected of them and keep all balls in the air, resulting in a flashing chair dance.
'Laat me' together with poem 'Oud' by Alvaro Oosterwolden
We cannot stop the passage of years, nor the associated decline. We must not focus on the negative but embrace the positive and love for life. The powerful text of the poet gives food for thought.
'Wild is the wind' Nina Simone
This song by David Bowie takes on a more lived touch in Nina Simone's rendition. A woman who had to deal with a lot of prejudice, suffering and pain in her life. The text 'Love me, love me, love me, say you do' expresses the yearning for harmony and tenderness. The choreography is built around this duality: transparent and raw. Humanity and love in imperfection.
'Kenau' Wyke van Weelden
With the title song 'Kenau', from the film of the same name by singer-songwriter Wyke van Weelden, the performance is concluded. A strong, yearning text on which Beernaert focuses. She interprets her own feelings in her dance vocabulary and incorporates those of her dancers as well, with images that stick to the ribs.
Requests
As a final piece, some requests from her loyal fans and admirers are also accommodated. "You make and create things," Beernaert says, "but you don't know what impact they will have on the audience. In this period, we are experiencing more than ever that culture, in whatever form, is extremely important for the soul and well-being of people. When people are emotionally exhausted, in distress, art can be a form of safety net. To ease the pain in one way or another. This clearly emerges from the comments on the requests. It does an enormous amount of good to experience that some images remained burned on the retina through the sound and tenor of the music and the expressive, empathetic, dancing images on it. They became important to someone, a straw, a push in the back to continue. That makes this work so challenging for me and also gives me an enormous amount of satisfaction."
Fragments from her old choreographies were also shown from 'Ne me quitte pas', 'The nature of daylight' etc…
There was also a word of thanks to the administrative services in the theaters and cultural centers, who, given the repeatedly extended lockdown, have very flexibly kept postponing the dates of the performance 'Naakt'.
WHAT: Livestream Squared Online
WHO: Isabelle Beernaert
WHEN: 17 January 2021 https://www.squared-online.com
PHOTO: Kim Vos