Ultima Vez / Wim Vandekeybus (Belgium) - Talk to the Demon
For Talk to the Demon, Wim Vandekeybus is working with a team of six performers and a child.
Vandekeybus: “We humans are desperately busy with giving sense to everything that happens between two mysteries - birth and death. That's the beautiful and dangerous side of our existence. We are inventive, we're gamblers and risk takers. We try to be what we are not. We like to suggest, to think in associations. Those are our instincts and impulses, but society creates rules, which suppress this in order to go against the chaos in our heads.
We all create demons inside ourselves to fight out our inner struggles - we just have to see them as a part of us, to make the darkness a part of what we are. Good can't exist without bad... It's just a question of balance.
The word ‘demon’ is very negatively loaded in western culture, but it also has different meanings in other cultures: magician, healer, the embodiment of nothingness, the unconscious part of ourselves, a clown, a fallen angel.... To this I want to add: the instinct of a child. Not in the sense of the child on stage, but especially in the adults who are acting around the child. Talk to the Demon is a piece for adults, featuring a child who is the ‘architect’ of what is happening. It radiates a demonic innocence, which makes us adults often look like fools or clowns, depending on which approach or angle you follow.
Talk to the Demon is a piece without music. In that sense it's very scary, very naked, but at the same time also pure and touching. Performances are often too beautifully packaged in order to hide what's really presented. It's like a clothed person or a naked one: we should feel good in both cases. After all, we are what we are…”
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