Chapters of Celebration is a full-evening dance marathon, a collective ‘museum of revelry’. The musical leitmotif is La Folia (‘madness’) or Folies d’Espagne, a 15th-century Iberian musical theme that reverberates like a heartbeat through the history of classical music, thanks to arrangements by composers such as Bach, Vivaldi, and Rachmaninov.
Composer and pianist Wouter Deltour arranged the various compositions into a sparkling contemporary whole. Director Benjamin Abel Meirhaeghe asked six renowned choreographers to liberate the carousing body in chapters that combine baroque dance with ballroom, jazz and rave. Like archaeologists of celebration, they work with six singing dancers in an attempt to capture the freedom and madness that originally existed in human communities. In Chapters of Celebration, we hear political, ritual echoes of the exuberance that humanity gradually seems to have lost.
Following the highly praised Madrigals, also involving B’Rock’s musicians, director Benjamin Abel Meirhaeghe and composer Wouter Deltour again explore their shared love of classical music and ritual. Chapters of Celebration is a powerful reminder of the universal need to celebrate, an infectious antidote to individualism. So we don’t forget to keep on dancing, always.
A production commissioned by EUROPALIA ESPAÑA and DE SINGEL by Benjamin Abel Meirhaeghe, Wouter Deltour & Muziektheater Transparant, in co-production with EUROPALIA ESPAÑA, B’Rock Orchestra, DE SINGEL, Toneelhuis (Antwerp), Festspielhaus St. Pölten, Perpodium vzw. With the support of the Tax Shelter measure of the Belgian federal government and the Flemish government.
