Lyubov

Première
12 Oct 2024
Location
Indoor
Age
All ages
Setting
frontal
Duration
60 min.
Language
Universal

Lyubov is an unpretentious attempt to fuse the traditions and aesthetics of dance and circus into a quirky new universe. As an audience member, you are plunged into a mad anti-heroic epos, a tragicomic jungle where judgement is out of the question. You get to know a glamorous, magnificent, brittle, dramatic, diabolical, extremely strong, but perhaps above all a recognisably ‘lonely’ person. Because in this life you have to build your own party.

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Lyubov (a Russian woman’s name meaning ‘love’) is a work that contains a lot of symbolism, a work that is made up of symbols but leaves the spectator free to choose whether or not to go along with it. The abundance of symbols shapes a performance which can also simply be fun to watch, which is fine, not everything has to be too serious.

Karlien creates a poetic and visual landscape based on winks at stereotypical elements from the ‘canon’ of circus and (contemporary) dance. The starting point of the creation is the desire and the conviction to present a character with whom everyone, sooner or later, is more or less connected - either emotionally, (kin)aesthetically, physically or simply because of a funny joke or an appealing image.

Thanks to an atypical artistic path, Karlien has gathered a great variety of movement and performance qualities over the years. For Lyubov, she uses all her skills, juggling the heavy human themes and freedom of movement of contemporary dance, the extra dimension of aerial circus and the heartfelt sincerity of classical clowning. Despite impressive technical feats, the aim is not sterile perfection, but rather a virtuoso code switching between physical languages.

You can expect raw beauty, or beautiful rawness, plenty of muscle and hidden musical gems.