Labyrinth

Muziektheater Transparant's annual youth project has for years been the place where young musical talent gathers during the summer.

In Labyrinth, sixteen young musicians are on stage. They form a musical circle. They dance and play. Sometimes leaving the safety of their instrument behind, they stand one by one or in groups in front of the microphone. They come to speak. In an improvisational way, they answer questions that are not self-evident.

In a whirlwind, they form endless enumerated answers, training analogue memory and all the slowness, vulnerability and forgetfulness that memory simply entails. Starting with personal core memories, they descend further and further into the unknowable, into the chaotic, into a 'dark and uncanny future'. They get lost deeper and deeper in the labyrinth. A friction arises between an unknowable black hole and the endless desire to get to know it. How, despite all the chaos, can we continue to speak and play? How to (re)find joy in it?

This year, Muziektheater Transparant's two-week music theatre workshop will focus on the labyrinth. A labyrinth can work as a place that is not fully graspable, not fixed but always in play, in transition, in flow, always a little lost, full of shadow, a place of the dark future that awaits us all.

"I used the construction of the Chartres Labyrinth as a tool to counterbalance the dominant nature of a melody.... What I mean is that a melody has such a strong musical force that it becomes the most dominant thing... The path in Chartres' Labyrinth goes around itself eleven times, so I used this number as a rhythm measure. The counterintuitive, chaotic nature of this number tempers the dominance of melody." (Brice Soniano, composer and conductor, on the music in Labyrinth) The Chartres labyrinth is a so-called one-way labyrinth, an old classical pattern that dates back to the Middle Ages. This means that when you reach the middle, you have walked through all the corridors. There are no dead-end paths. You are led all the way in and out. The system is very harmonious, there is only one continuous route.

Credits

• Direction | Scenography • Laurens Aneca / Jesse Vandamme
• Musical direction • Brice Soniano
• Musical coaching • Naomi Beeldens / Isaak Duerinck / Oene Van Geel
• Costumes • Emma Vandenberghe

Participants: Rune Fonteyn Seidel, Sophie Paeshuyse, Yenthe Geudens, Astrid Mertens, Aumi Derycke, Hanna Vandergoten, Lorraine Gilliard, Sabine Pendry, Adinda Pijl, Saar Philips, Suzan Peeters, Clara Muylle, Emma Devillé, Emma Verbruggen, Floor Verhaegen, Nathalie Van Meirvenne, Adriaan Campo