Aïda Gabriëls

Soldering together theatre, dance, contemporary music and opera, Aïda Gabriëls (1993) focused on researching and developing a transdisciplinary language through a diverse range of projects, both during and after her Theatre Arts degree at UGent.

With the rehearsal room and stage as her playground, she reflects on social themes with a series of different line-ups. Taking the opera genre as her starting point, she explores the emancipatory and artistic possibilities of the interplay of disciplines. In 2016 she debuted with the versatile soundscape opera Medeamaterial, in which a soprano and double bassist hook onto Heiner Müllers unruly dilemma in the form of poetry. For Concertgebouw Brugge (2017) she deployed two dancers, live video and a percussionist to raise the question of guilt in times of war in I AM THE ENEMY YOU KILLED, MY FRIEND, which took Benjamin Britten's War Requiem as its starting point. 2018 was dedicated to HAVEN, a raw interpretation of Jason’s side of the story in the Medea myth. In 2021 she embarked on a durable partnership with Ancienne Belgique, which led to the conception of VACUUM and Dance of the Seven Veils. 2022 was focused on The Wild Stage. From 2023, Aïda has been artist-in-residence at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp and is developing Passages, an on-location project that will premiere in 2024. At the same time, she is working on Ethereal Realms, a solo for the French-Swiss Marie Delprat that focuses on musical personas and is due to premiere at Dampfzentrale in Bern in 2024.  

Together with dramaturg Tessa Vannieuwenhuyze, she is part of oester. oester is in-house artist at Muziektheater Transparant and artist-in-residence at KMSKA and Ancienne Belgique Brussels. 

Aïda is artistic coordinator at Music Theatre NOW. Music Theatre NOW Network is a leading global network of musical theatre presenters, producers and artists. Through the biennial global competition and the Creators Connection Program, they strive to transform contemporary musical theatre into the most dynamic, interdisciplinary art form of our era.