THE NEXT FEW MONTHS AT NEEDCOMPANY:

Before summer arrives we would like to give you a summary of what Needcompany has to offer:

This door is too small (for a bear), the new dance production by Grace Ellen Barkey, having shaken up Brussels and Marseille, is continuing on its victorious march to Frankfurt, Gijon, Mons (B), Strombeek, Bruges, Leuven, Tongeren and Essen. This is how Luk Lambrecht put it: “After Chunking (2005) and The Porcelain Project (2007), This door is too small (for a bear) is latest of her fairytales that cling to the outer edge of the imagination. Grace Ellen Barkey unfolds a visual stage language that is clear, sparkling, expressive, effervescent, filmic, humorous, ironic and above all disarmingly appealing. (…) The implicit, virtual images in the mind of the choreographer are brought together, knitted and sewn; in short they are made ‘visual’ by the way Lot Lemm provides an ‘image’ for ‘what’ the choreographer attempts to ‘depict’ on stage as a ‘new’ world.”

A selection from the reviews:

The performance, chock-full of images and references, crazily fizzes off in all possible directions.
...
It's tacky and childish at once, with these characters dressed up as bears, rabbits or mice, decked out from head to foot in brightly coloured knitted costumes. For contemporary art followers, it's reminiscent of Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy. The rest of the performance is radically different, except for the enduring sweet silliness: young female dancers whose too perfectly synchronised movements remind us of the nautical ballets of Hollywood in the Forties, a side-splitting ‘Swan Lake’ is danced by the men while Julien Faure leaps around, stark naked but armed with a Magritte-like bowler hat to hide ‘that which should not be seen’. A little later the three fellows seem to be shooting a ‘film noir’ by Tim Burton on the encounter of a bear with a mouse. A question rings out: “Do you feel alive?”, and the female dancer yells: “I am alive”. That's the main thing.
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One steps out slightly taken aback, but also elated by this merry mix borne aloft on the company's energy and the unusual visual beauty of the scenography.
27/02/2010 - La Libre Belgique – Guy Duplat

These goings-on make as much sense as a crazy dream. But everything comes together again at the end. A huge, Chinese-looking screen lights up. Two screens slide back and forth across the stage. This gives rise to mysterious spaces in which the performers dance duets. Sometimes tender, sometimes rough. Suddenly all the chaos seems forgotten, especially when, smiling broadly, they all perform an oriental variety ballet. They look like the model of happiness. But after everything that went before, you know this can’t be true.
27/02/2010 – De Morgen – Pieter T’Jonck

Ricky and Ronny and Hundred Stars – a Sado Country Opera, the second opera by MaisonDahl Bonnema, did not pass unnoticed either at the premiere in Maastricht or the performances in Bergen (NO) and Brussels. They are increasingly acquiring skills in a new and unprecedented opera idiom. Beware of being unsettled by the harshness of their story. Or, as Frank Vande Veire wrote: “The Catastrophe has long been a utility item, a tune in our mind, a slightly sharp perfume, a masturbation fantasy, a game, an aphrodisiac. It is not just a thing we are afraid of because it would bring an end to our comfortable little lives. We stupefy ourselves with it so we can endure this little life. In a world with no conceivable alternative it is the final image of the True Life.”
In June this production is on the programme of the Operadagen in Rotterdam and in August the Noorderzon Festival in Groningen. In September it will be on in Wroclaw.

In the beginning they sing to an ethereal soundtrack as they fly through a cloud above Paris and ultimately land in a park. The trio will in fact often return to the clouds, both in their heads and with their bodies.
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In the park they have some wild nights packed with sex, drugs and violence. The psychedelia takes them tumbling from one place to another, resulting in a confusion that makes indistinct leaps through space and time. It is the confusion which the characters themselves feel that also guides you agreeably through the world they are involved in.
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This emptiness leaves you with a remarkably contented restfulness. But if the spirit of Nietzsche is truly to be found in this piece, as Dahl hinted in the discussion afterwards, it cannot end with emptiness. Even though Nietzsche was the philosopher with the hammer, who smashed all accepted truths and experienced the black hole several times in his own life, he was also the philosopher who repeatedly rose again and refilled the void with a message for mankind. It is to be hoped that we shall see this in the final part of Ricky and Ronny’s trilogy.
24/3/2010 - www.goddeau.com – Kjell Dupon

Summer will only really begin when Jan Lauwers’ Sad Face | Happy Face trilogy is performed in Poznan. This six-hour theatre marathon will be performed twice at the Malta Festival there.

Jan Lauwers’ production The Deer House continues to tour: in June it will be on in Vienna, where Needcompany is artist-in-residence at the Burgtheater. In September it is on the bill in Hanover and Belgrade.

The Ballad of Ricky and Ronny – a Pop Opera, a MaisonDahlBonnema production, will be on at Eurokaz in Zagreb in June and in October travels to Calgary in Canada and to Bruges.

Jan Lauwers’ Isabella’s room is to be performed in Metz at the end of May, and in September it too is on in Belgrade and Vienna.

OHNO COOPERATION has been invited by Luk Lambrecht for part of the big project on
‘beauty’ at Strombeek Cultural Centre in the autumn, under the title ‘The Good, The Bad & The Ugly’. The Tragedy of the Applause - Strombeek is a group exhibition put together by
OHNO COOPERATION. It includes work by Rombout Willems, Jan
Lauwers, Maarten Seghers and Nicolas Field. It is also accompanied by a concert with Eric
Sleichim as guest.