Year in, year out, the Brigittines International Festival brings you a programme of contemporary performances: innovative languages, bizarre universes, strange and original forms that speak to the imagination.
The Festival is a collection of shows that hinge on a certain idea, presented as an object of thought, inventiveness or a sharing of fantasy. As years went on, dance has begun to feature more strongly in the Festival, undoubtedly because it is a freer and more creative form of expression.
Every year, the Festival centres on a new theme, raising a new question and
encouraging spectators to consider
the issue on hand in a new light via the connections, the emotional paths and
any suggested reading they are offered. On the basis of their own impressions
and insights, spectators can find a connection between performances that vary
greatly in style but touch on quite similar topics.
"DRIFTING ZONES AND WHIRLWINDS"
In a recent book by one of Iceland’s greatest writers, Jón Kalman Stefánsson*, powerful emotion arises from drifting zones, where the line between the narrative and the imaginative becomes indistinguishable. These points of uncertainty create the sensation of entering into an unknown, albeit wholly our own, world.
Similar shocks are upsetting today’s performance world. We are faced with the troubling impression that we don’t really understand the meaning of what we see. These moments of total indecision are invaluable. Not knowing what to think leads us to something different to what we are used to seeing and experiencing.
This elsewhere is liberating vis-à-vis all that confines us in the mundaneness of live, as we walk the tight line that follows current event, where everything is accelerating and transforming, without ever really c hanging. Neither virtual worlds or artificial intelligence are likely to alter the nature of sad passions, obsessions for power, and violent urges (although these will inevitably take on new shapes and forms).
Above all, this forced familiarity with ‘elsewhere’ and ‘differently’ project us into a whirlwind of perceptions, far away from the sterility of identity poles and the pleas for reassurance that would have us believe that creativity is clean-cut, imbued with morality and self-righteousness – the zeitgeist. But the weather is often stormy, dripping with conformism and normativity.
We want the stage to be as uninhibited as a body that invents its own forms and dynamics, its conditions of existence, its potential for humour, and its imaginary spheres. A stage that searches for itself in the sensible and the unusual, and in the wonder of living.
Patrick Bonté
General and Artistic Director