Mondstuk at Transit Festival

More than fifteen years after its first and only performance, Apsara performed Mondstuk again at the Transit Festival (Leuven). When the ladies of Apsara told me last summer that they would like to perform this piece again, I initially had mixed feelings. The highly formalised body language in Mondstuk is symptomatic of my interest at the time in trying to ‘materialise’ bodily presence as compositional material. From today’s perspective, the result may raise questions of an almost ethical nature. The fact that the score of Mondstuk prescribes not only all the sounds and rhythms but also the movements that produce these sounds, locks the performers into the score and leaves them little freedom to engage with the piece in a personal way.

Nevertheless, Apsara did a great job and reconnected and reconciled me with some of my fascinations of the past. Experiencing the piece again, it struck me how the formalisation of actions leads to an abstraction that creates distance and openness at the same time. I am not done with this piece yet…