Ian Abbott at the KFDA (Kunstenfestivaldesarts) in Brussels
Posted: December 13th, 2024 | Author: Ian Abbott | Filed under: Festival, Performance | Tags: A7LA5, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Begüm Erciyas, Chantal Akerman, Christophe Slagmuylder, Daniel Blanga Gubbay, Dries Douibi, Faye Driscoll, Frederik Verrote, Frie Leysen, Hsu Che-Yu, Idio Chichava, KFDA, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Kwame Boafo, Liah Frank, Maria Hassabi, Moe Satt, Nicolas Edelman, Radouan Mriziga, Rosas | Comments Off on Ian Abbott at the KFDA (Kunstenfestivaldesarts) in BrusselsIan Abbott reports on both the nature of the KFDA in Brussels and some of the performances he saw.
KFDA (Kunstenfestivaldesarts) is an international performing arts festival in Brussels dedicated to contemporary theatre, dance, performance and visual arts. It was established by Frie Leysen and first held in 1994, the year after the establishment of the EU. Leysen has spoken in previous interviews about how Brussels was seeking to become the political capital of Europe, but at this point in history it trailed other capitals as a cultural centre. KFDA sought to position itself as a bridge between Belgium’s French-speaking Walloon and the Flemish-speaking Flanders regions, framing itself as a festival for both populations in a city with a population of 1.2 million.
Since 2019 KFDA has been programmed by co-artistic directors Daniel Blanga Gubbay and Dries Douibi, with Frederik Verrote as Financial Director. The very first words in the festival program (which is printed in Dutch, French and English to reflect its trilingual territory, ongoing dual financial investments and its international status) set the tone: ‘Theatre, dance, performance and visual arts: KFDA is a celebration of international contemporary creation. During three weeks, it invites artists both local and international to challenge our relationship with the world and present their bold artistic creations in some 30 cultural venues and public spaces in Brussels.’
Being my first visit, I hadn’t realised how popular a stopover KFDA is on the merry-go-round of global festival programmers who gather from all continents to take in the work on offer before heading off to their next shopping trip at Montreal’s Festival TransAmérique. Indeed, this year’s festival was chock-full of intellectually satisfying new work that was conceptually deft and exquisitely executed.
Listening to Gubbay share an overview of how he programs the festival, he spoke about how they are actively preserving the freedom and space for artists to change the works right up until the last minute and not demanding to know all the information ten months before the festival begins. So all that the festival has to go on is a leading concept and trust in the artist that they will deliver something. What was interesting to hear was that before COVID they were also racking up the air miles travelling to existing festival contexts in Kyoto, Sao Paolo and other places to see/programme work, but this meant they would only reproduce what already exists and the circulation/amount of work for this scale of festival is actually quite small. Now, they’re less interested in that, so for example Gubbay travelled to Kyrgyzstan to meet with artists outside a festival context and to see many things that were in rehearsal.
KFDA is also a well-resourced festival. In an interview in 2008, the then artistic director Christophe Slagmuylder revealed that the festival’s total budget was 2,700,000 euros with ‘more than half the budget devoted to the artistic aspects like production of works. This is because one of the big prerequisites we have set for ourselves is that ours be a creation type festival.’ Gubbay revealed during this year’s festival that the current budget is around 3,000,000 euros for around 30 productions/projects. To put that into a UK perspective, the combined 2022/23 annual accounts and total annual expenditure for four of this country’s prestigious festivals — Fierce, LIFT, Dance Umbrella and Transform — do not add up to KFDA’s annual budget.
Another comparison with the UK that opened my eyes was the openness of KFDA’s stance on Palestine. A full-page announcement in the KFDA program called for donations for Living Stipends for Palestine followed by a trilingual quote: ‘People in Palestine are facing horrific levels of violence and destruction with no end in sight. Palestinians, including artists, curators, musicians, performers, writers, dancers, filmmakers are in dire need of help, from water and food to shelter and medication. KFDA supports and shares the call to donate to Living Stipends for Palestine, a program set up by Mophradat to provide livelihood grants to Palestinian professional artists and cultural workers directly affected by the War. Mophradat, a long-standing partner of the festival, is a Brussels-based IVZW/AISBL that creates opportunities for artists from the Arab World and has vast experience and networks in the region. All donated funds go to the artists; beneficiaries are determined through a nomination process by peers.’
Can you imagine a UK festival or venue being as transparent in their politics and having a full-page ad in their programme calling for the financial support of Palestinian artists? One has only to recall that, due to the work of Bands Boycott Barclays, 100 musical acts boycotted The Great Escape festival in response to the sponsorship of Barclays bank, and a raft of literary festivals has ended their relationship with Baillie Gifford due to the work of Fossil Free Books. On March 15th 2024, the UK Cultural Workers Against Genocide (@cwag_uk) disrupted an event at Sadler’s Wells attended by CEO Sir Alistair Spalding and their associate artist Wayne McGregor CBE. CWAG asked Spalding if he had any intention of dropping Sadler’s Wells’ sponsor Barclays, who have increased their investments in companies producing weapons used in Israel’s strikes on Palestine, and whether he would agree to a meeting with them. He refused to answer their questions and walked petulantly off stage.
So, is KFDA too good to be true? A well-resourced festival, set in a walkable city, which invests in artists, supports them to take risks and make new work and wears its politics clearly…what’s the catch?
In the introduction to the program by Gubbay and Douibi there’s a description about how the world begins at a kitchen table (a phrase coined by the poet Joy Harjo) which describes that moment of togetherness as a genesis. There’s a few phrases in the introduction which set the organisational and artistic ethos:
‘If we had to remake the world, what would we build? What is this magical moment when we come together without knowing what will happen?’
‘Every gathering around a table is an act of negotiation: we take our seats and adjust to the openings left by others, the unwritten choreography of being together.’
‘The festival can be a gathering around a table bringing artists and audiences together. It can be a place to discuss the world we contend with and the world we desire, a table we can use in a different way.’
This introduction is followed by an additional page in the program which acts as an access key. It has eight illustrations and brief trilingual descriptions around accessibility to indicate which venues/performances have what access provision in place:
1) Accessible for wheelchair users
2) Accessible for wheelchair users with assistance
3) Arrival with wheelchair to be confirmed during online reservation or through box office
4) Stair-climbing (up or down)
5) Interpreted in Sign Language
6) Audio Description
7) Audio Induction Loop
8) Seating without backrest
There’s more information about accessibility on pages 128 to 137 of the programme along with a whole section that reads in part, ‘Visitor tips aspire to make everybody feel at home at the festival regardless of needs, identities or spoken language. More broadly this is a work in co-construction that tries to shift the norms and concepts of what an arts festival is, how it is organised and for whom.’
Why then, for the entire, three-week, €3,000,000 festival, is there just one performance that is sign language interpreted and one that is audio described with an accompanying touch tour? Sink that in. If you’re visually impaired, live in Brussels and maybe want to visit the festival, there’s just one performance that you’re able to access. With this jarring disconnect between written policy and outcome that is little more than ableism in thin disguise, one wonders who really gets to be together in Brussels?
Even the hype around sign language interpretation is condescending: ‘Attend a performance interpreted in Sign Language! One of the performances of Les jours de mon abandon by Gaia Saitta is accessible to Deaf and hearing-impaired people thanks to interpretation in Sign Language of French-Speaking Belgium (LSFB). During this performance the interpreter is situated at the side of the stage facing the people who wish to benefit from it. In collaboration with: Cosens, Sortir avec les mains.’
‘With audio description, shows are accessible to visually impaired people. The technique consists of a live description of the visual content of the piece, broadcast through headphones so as not to interfere with the smooth running of the performance. Prior to the performance, visually impaired people can also take part in a touch tour, where they are allowed to touch set pieces and costumes. This year, one of the performances of La vie secrete des vieux by Mohamed El Khatib will be audio described in French and preceded by a touch tour.’
Can we talk about the use of the exclamation mark, as if attending a Sign Language interpreted performance is some sort of novelty? Should we talk also about how audio description and the access needs of visually impaired people shouldn’t ‘interfere with the smooth running of the performance?’
The programme choosers, access team and marketing folk clearly need to sit around their own kitchen table and sort this out before the next festival, which runs from May 9th to the 31st 2025.
Let’s talk now about the works chosen for the festival.
Weathering by Faye Driscoll is one of the most exhilarating performances I have ever been a part of. It’s a site of front row benefits, of entanglement frenzies and of proximity to proximities. It’s home to a heat-spiralling cinematic zoetrope, where a careening mass of 10 dancers — Driscoll calls them ‘chariots of flesh’ — begins to slowly rotate (and be rotated with increasing velocity over 70 minutes) on a bed-shaped raft to a point of climax.
On this, her second visit to KFDA (after Thank you for coming: Space in 2021), Weathering sits beautifully in the round, in the Horta Hall of Bozar (Centre for Fine Arts). It has the compositional skill of classic renaissance sculpture riding a demented choreographic waltzer without a lap bar mixed with Joel Goodman’s iconic photograph taken on the streets of Manchester on New Year’s Eve 2015.
Whilst it started with a Laurie Anderson-esque choral song cycle going through all of the bodily sites/functions — “o scrotum, o lips, o guts” — the imperceptible anticipation and glacial physical evolution of the dancers slow-tearing at each other (it might take 3 rotations for an arm to come out a jacket), or crashing strawberries into teeth with some added fleshy thigh biting, it finished with one of the dancers (Cory) coming to rest their armpit on my thigh for 5 minutes as they breathily recovered from their choreographic exhaustion leaving an armpit and forearm imprint of earned sweat on my leg.
Originally premiered in April 2023 in New York, this was a performance that re-activated sensorial emotions as a theatre watcher/lover that I recognised (only afterwards) had long been dormant. Unfathomably, the only time that Driscoll has presented a work in the UK was in 2016 with her work Thank You For Coming: Attendance at the Belfast International Arts Festival. If this work is touring within 200 miles of you, you should go and inject it into your veins, get a ringside seat at the hedonistic choreographic swingers party for the ages.
Earlier that evening I had come from Le 140 after watching the equally joyous Vagabundus by Idio Chichava (which recently won the Salavisa European Dance Award) and I do not think I have had a better evening in my dance watching life than these two works. ‘Thirteen performers dance and sing their hearts out, as if in ecstasy. They move as one global body through scenes reminiscent of street life…periodically, one will escape the dance only to be lovingly reunited with the group…they sing traditional and contemporary Mozambican songs, gospel and baroque motifs and Vagabundus depicts life as a constant coming together and being together in a group, and migration as a possibly emotional, spiritual and collective journey.’
At a shade over 70 minutes, this choral, communal choreography from a uniformly strong cast — complete with tire runners, trolley pushers and bag whistlers who were parading up and down the auditorium aisles before the show began — left me in raptures. I appreciated the choices of how Chichava orchestrated a mass of 13 bodies on stage and framed fragility, when a lone single body would sometimes peel off, test what it’s like to be alone, before recognising the strength of the community and return. The choreography was unrelenting in its physicality and what made this work even more special were the songs being sung live by the same cast without an inch of breathlessness in the midst of the choreography.
Wandering the post-midnight streets of Brussels and heading back to my apartment that night I was in bits, reflecting on the euphoria that I felt from experiencing these two works while in a rage at how these same two works and the majority of the festival were inaccessible to many disabled audience members.
When you live in the UK, you rarely get to see the signature works of international choreographers like Germaine Acogny and it’s nigh on impossible to see new works by them if you live outside a capital city. So I was particularly interested to see the premiere of a new Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker work in her home venue, at the biggest performing arts festival in Belgium. Surely that is going to produce the optimum set of conditions to create the greatest possible work. But oh my days, we need to talk about the positioning and the canon of historically ‘important’ choreographers who are still active but who have grooved themselves so far down that they’re existing in a xeroxed pastiche of their own identity and practice.
Il Cimento dell’Armonia e dell’Inventione (The Trial of Harmony and Invention) by De Keersmaeker, Radouan Mriziga, Rosas and A7LA5 took place at the currently-under-construction and pro-Palestine-graffitied Rosas Performance Space in the middle of May 2024 and was based on The Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi. Unfortunately it was everything I’d expect a De Keersmaeker performance to be: boring, repetitive, infuriating, formal, indulgent, wasteful, knowing, and it displayed a woeful understanding of how to integrate a bboy into a predominant contemporary dance cast. I am unsure how De Keersmaeker and Mriziga shaped/choreographed the work together, but there was a long shadow of the former in play.
In addition to the festival’s carefully designed programs, Rosas had created their own A4, heavy card/multi fold printed programme. On the same table there was an Upcoming Activities May-June 2024 at P.A.R.T.S. (School for Contemporary Dance where the curriculum is based on De Keersmaeker’s artistic practice) in which they were advertising a week-long thematic lab happening in July 2024 at Gaasbeek on Dance & Nature: Hand Power, Horse Labour & Dance with De Keersmaeker and Corentin Hannon. Mornings were to be full of movement sessions and afternoons a place to learn scything (guided by Kevin Lambeets), wood lumbering, haymaking as well as pulling exercises with draught horses.
I would rather have reviewed the process and encounters made in the lab, as that might offer some new perspectives on choreography and performance. De Keersmaeker has this status of Queenhood in Belgium, but how her work is spoken about in private by some of the current generation of cultural workers, artists and producers I encountered from Brussels was very different. Whilst they recognise her heritage, impact and historical importance. they think the work she makes is dull and says little about Belgium and its place in the world today. I think they were being kind.
Since I returned from Brussels, De Keersmaeker’s status suffered a severe challenge when an investigative report was published by De Standard outlining the ‘emotionally manipulative behaviour’, ‘humiliation’ and ‘psychological violence’ enacted by De Keersmaeker on her dancers (21 former employees spoke to De Standaard). In addition, a newly installed, 4-person horizontal management structure (put in place around 2022 at the same time as a new psychosocial well-being action plan) which was meant to create ‘a heat shield’ around De Keersmaeker, was disbanded in the Spring of 2023 alongside a €400,000 loss. After significant news coverage across the summer, De Keersmaeker made this statement on September 17th 2024 which included these lines: ‘I want to offer my apologies to all the people I have disappointed and hurt along the way. I am aware that accepting responsibility and offering apologies for things that happened in the past is not enough.’ Maybe we do need to talk about artistic alignment, ableism and brand contagion when the dark things that go on behind closed doors suddenly become public.
Stepping outside of the KFDA context for a moment, the pioneering Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) had a retrospective exhibition, Travelling, at Bozar that ran until July 21st 2024 before heading to Paris at the Jeu de Paume in September. The exhibition traced the atypical trajectory of Ackerman from her first films to her last installation and featured never-before-seen images and working documents from across her career.
There was a work in Travelling which took my breath away, and whilst it wasn’t framed as a screen dance work, it was certainly choreographic and a stunning portrait of both landscapes and people, many of whom were waiting in snow-globed scenes somewhere in Central/Eastern Europe in the early 1990s. D’Est, au bord de la fiction (1995) was an installation (drawn from her 110-minute 1993 film D’Est) presented on 8 banks of three 1990s cube monitors. 24 + 1 screens of slow tracking (both l-r and r-l) documentary scenes on a 6-minute loop. The harmonious patterns and synchronicity of seeing people being disgorged onto snow-filled bus stations, to virtuosic technicolour cello playing in resplendent red velvet theatres offers a delicious interplay between documentary/fiction and clinical observation/atmospheric musings. Spending two hours in Akerman’s world, examining her scripts, contact sheets, unpublished rushes and revisiting D’Est, au bord de la fiction three times enabled me to engage with the work in a heightened state; my emotional antennae were attuned to the sensibilities and aesthetics in play and there was something about this work on which I homed in.
The majority of work by filmmakers and screen-based artists is often single screen or projected on a large screen and for me and my body, it’s difficult (as someone who is non-disabled) to engage with work like this because galleries often provide seating and/or chairs that are inherently uncomfortable. If you are being asked to sit in one place for an hour-long film work and the gallery is making you sit on a hard backed, cheap wooden chair that has terrible lumbar support, it’s really not encouraging you to dwell in that environment.
What was interesting about the D’Est, au bord de la fiction space was that it was dark. The only light coming in was from the 24 screens and so it felt like you could move around and in between the monitors. Unlike standing very far back and absorbing the whole installation from a single vantage point it was as if my body was moving in between and slowly panning through the screens mirroring the same camera speed and bodily movement on the screens. I became part of this work.
Threshold by Kwame Boafo was a world premiere presented in the round at Arts et Metiers – Institut Maguerite Massart and these are some of the programme notes: ‘Threshold embodies a journey of exploration, a continuous research dialogue between humans and non-humans, spatiotemporal mobility, and memory…I aim to encounter unexpected tensions, discoveries and choreographies, where the human body becomes a medium for narrating the geo-porting of goods…by exploring the interplay between movement and memory, I hope to provoke contemplation on the interconnectedness of consumerism and environmental sustainability. What becomes of end-of-life automobiles when, passing through Brussels, they end up in a West African city?’
Whilst (conceptually) it is interesting to think about the disjointed engine parts and other chunks of metallic automobile that are dotted about the space and how/where they end up in the consumption chain, the execution and dramaturgy of this 45-minute performance was pretty shallow and naive. The optimum format for some ideas is not always dance. Threshold is not a dance work. With Boafo crawling around the space with plastic flowers covering his face, balancing unsteadily on engine parts, washing his hands in an oily drawer and pushing pieces of metal on the IMM circular grill — there was little urgency, charisma or watchability.
It felt like the video screens — which were documenting bodies breaking down car parts like an artisan blacksmith, extracting the next layer of value out of these already discarded objects — have the kernel of something to explore further and if these were accompanied by his considered programme notes then a more coherent articulation begins to form in a format that is better suited to the intention.
If we’re talking about intentions, then Maria Hassabi — who returned to KFDA for the third time (Premiere in 2014 and Staged? in 2017) with her work On Stage at Théâtre des Martyrs — is very clear on why this work belongs on stage. In the programme she was in conversation with Gubbay and these are some of her reflections on the work: ‘On Stage is related to ideas of presentation within the theatre space. My works usually have a strong installation aspect within them. Here, the installation is the actual space of the theatre, the stage, empty as it is…I wanted to produce a minimalist work for a proscenium stage that would neglect the vastness of its space…with this solo I wanted to sidestep this expectation of a division and instead generate a possibility of an intimate exchange with the audience. A bet on intimacy, while flirting with ideas of expectations.’
Whilst On Stage stimulated a cheeseboard of responses within me, it also left me conflicted. A lot of people HATE this type of work and at times I wanted to rage quit this White, western Butoh imitation — which was so conceptually simple: around 15 formally recognisable poses are held and are slowly (and I mean very slowly) transitioned from one to another over 60 minutes — but then I’d fall into its rhythm and it would capture me, before wanting to rage quit it all over again. I’d lose myself in the space that the work provides and find myself thinking about suns rising, seeds unfurling, The Empty Space by Peter Brook, celestial space time, Min Tanaka and glaciers breaking off ice shelves in Antarctica.
Whilst thinking all of these things, I’d been watching Hassabi intently and noticing the trembling hem on her denim jeans — one of the few signs of the hyper engaged muscle control she was exerting to move at such a pace. I’m not used to giving my attention to a three-minute ballet bow which has an equally long transition into hands slinked into pockets — gestures which are invisible in their biomechanical mundanity — yet here they demand our attention. We witness how the folds in her denim shirt shift imperceptibly as her breathing intensifies. How much or how little do we need to see to be entertained? It made me think of Nicolas Edelman, the ‘Official Dresser’ of Mannekin Pis, the famous tiny urinating statue which is dressed for half the year in a series of costumes. I stumbled upon and watched a ‘performance’ by Edelman which, whilst it wasn’t as slow as the one from Hassabi, had about the same amount of people watching and filming as were present at Théâtre des Martyrs and was well rehearsed (he’s been doing this 10+ years), gentle and very intimate.
The solo exhibition Three Episodes of Mourning Exercises by Hsu Che-Yu at the Argos Centre for Audiovisual Arts (which has an incredible artist bookshop out the back) offered a triptych of works on single/multiple/VR screens examining different types of grief, giving yet more space for audiences, but this time to engage/consider/exercise how we mourn. Similar to the work of Akerman, I wouldn’t classify any of the works as screen dance, but movement was central to each of them and they were deeply affecting. The VR work — a tribute to the artist’s deceased grandmother — recalled their experience of bodily perception in her house whilst contemplating death; this resonated hard. Conceptually, the idea of body, perception, architecture and death rang some Arakawa and Gins bells for me as these two artists have created liveable environments, art works and manifestos dealing with similar themes. But in reality, sat in Argos with the multiple genocides taking place across the world, our mourning muscle is being exercised too much recently as death is present both personally and globally.
It was a neat touch to use a 3D scanning technique (also used by Taiwanese police to collect forensic evidence, identify fragmented or decomposing bodies and examine crime scenes) to create a white, hard edged marshmallow environment where you could recognise the outlines of domestic settings, dressers, beds and the topography of bodies in the VR world but the scanning technique rendered bodies and homes anonymous. Without any colour and personality attached to these scanned worlds, they could be somewhere very close to home.
One final meeting and one final concept to finish my festival with — the concept of hands. The KFDA website offered me this: ‘In this double bill, we are asked to rethink the relationship with our hands and reflect on their role in the present, past and future.’
Stemming from his 2023, two-channel, 13-minute video installation of the same name, Moe Satt’s Nothing But Fingers, a 40-minute, outdoor, world premiere, was a gentle balm to encounter on a late morning amongst the tree-soaked courtyard of De Kriekelaar. ‘Fascinated by the role of hand gestures in South African hunting communication as well as traditional dance in Myanmar and Southeast Asia, where human gestures can take animal forms. With dancer Liah Frank, he explores the expressive potential of hands and their ability to direct energy flows in the body.’
Satt and Frank whistled and gestured their way through a series of exquisite, symmetrical hand choreographies and there was a delicious lightness to the work along with some audience interaction where we were asked to mimic some of the gestures, abetted by a series of oversized mirrors (in the shape of one of their gestures) and 3D printed, life-size rubber hands on sticks. Nothing But Fingers added a fine balance to the weight that a lot of the other works in the festival were dealing with and should continue to please audiences wherever it finds them.
I appreciate good programming and Nothing But Fingers was paired perfectly with Hands Made by Begüm Erciyas. ‘In Hands Made, the hands of the audience will take centre stage. Accompanied by a soundtrack, spectators are asked to observe their hand and that of their neighbour, creating an effect of intimacy and alienation. Separated from the rest of the body, our hands become the focus of a reflection on handwork and touch. What have these hands been busy with? Who or what will they touch in the future?’
Sat in the dark for 45 minutes, in one long row of chairs with only a lit desktop between each pair, we were invited to follow an instructional, head-phoned soundtrack and encounter the hand of a neighbour. As we entered and exited the space separately, I had no idea to whom the hand (that did not want to touch or be touched) belonged. This physical avoidance from my hand neighbour — or even brushing fingers — created a remarkable intimacy. An intimacy without touch. The avoidance of touch is more interesting here, because the instructions actively lead us into touch and when one hand out of the two refuses that instruction, the power of the work shifts and it creates different psychological narratives about why that person doesn’t want to touch/be touched.
Hands Made strips all superfluous distractions away and drills down to a point where you think it’s just your hand and the hand of another resting on the lit desktop, until…the desk begins to vibrate. Differing intensities of pneumatics means that hovering my hand just above the vibrating desk causes hundreds of consistent nervous sensations to light up my neural connectors about the sensation that’s localised to one part of my body while all the other narratives of touch between strangers are swimming in the air. What a work to finish on.
The 2024 edition of KFDA was a rarefied, eight-course, Michelin Star concept tasting menu and some of those dishes are amongst the best I’ve ever sampled. However, in a performing arts world where the default of power is still held by white, male and non-disabled bodies, if the festival wants to be judged on how it ‘challenges our relationship with the world’ and be ‘a place to discuss the world we contend with and the world we desire’ then it needs to be reimagined from the inside out.