From 2 to 5 May, Beyond the Black Box settles in Antwerp for the third time! During the four-day festival, you will discover artists who venture off the beaten track. They experiment with stimulating crossovers between theatre, performance and visual art. The festival challenges you to look at art differently. Be surprised by work in unexpected places or moments and come and experience with an open mind what more art can be.

Ticket info 

A day pass is required to visit Beyond the Black Box. This day pass gives you access to the entire programme on that specific day. However, you will need to make a reservation for some parts of the programme due to capacity. When you purchase your day pass, you can indicate which of these performances you wish to reserve for.

Beyond the Black Box works with the pay-what-you-can system. You buy a day pass at the price you decide.

Buy your day pass for Thursday 2 May here.
Buy your day pass for Friday 3 May here.
Buy your day pass for Saturday 4 May here.
Buy your day pass for Sunday 5 May here.

Timetables

Program

The Furious – Rodrigo Batista

2 may 2024 – 20.30
Monty

He is furious, the Brazilian theater maker Rodrigo Batista. In this two-part solo full of explicit images, sloganeering language and bloody porn, he throws his own body into battle against everything that is capitalist.

In (SIDE A) Rodrigo’s raging alter ego performs a dance solo to a soundtrack of Brazilian pop songs. He searches for the grotesque and the ecstatic and makes tangible an emphatically sexual and aggressive energy.

The B-SIDE is an intense political body investigation in which he unmasks decolonization as a territorial struggle and exposes pornography and necropolitics as excesses of a destructive capitalism.

Bonus Track is a video work that dissects a “new” type of ideological colonization based on familiar technologies used by the North American alt-right: fake news, explicit misogyny, racism, homophobia, conspiracy theories, anarcho-capitalism and the resulting destruction of Latin American democracy.

Folds&Wrinkles – Rebecca Lenaerts

2 may 2024 – 14.30
4 may 2024 – 14.00 & 16.30
5 may 2024 – 14.00 & 16.30
Monty & WZC Hof ter Beke

“Elders and ancestors are the oldest inhabitants on earth. Like stone and rock, they store ‘the deep knowledge’ of the earth. Time is carved into the wrinkles of the elderly. The transparency of their skin reveals the layers of a body.”

Folds&Wrinkles is a performance on the border between theater and visual art in which Rebecca Lenaerts works with linen, textiles and cotton sheets from her family. With this material full of story, she transforms her body into a sculpture. The textile sculpts the body. The folds have a life of their own. The viewer witnesses how the layers slowly peel away.

Tiny Demolitions – Line Mertens

2 may 2024 – 17.30
3 may 2024 – 18.30
4 may 2024 – 15.40
Monty, wpZimmer & WZC Hof ter Beke

Tiny Demolitions/De Zachte Afbraak speaks about the stories we live in every day.

For Beyond the Black Box, Line Mertens delivers 3 speeches, at three different locations at three different, unexpected moments.
Each speech is 20 minutes of speaking and public thinking.
Every topic that is addressed is highly personal and thoroughly political.

Tiny Demolitions doesn’t start out of nowhere. It builds on a long tradition of feminist theory and philosophy, and adds daily life, situated in body, time and space.

Tiny Demolitions is dedicated to demolishing myths and collecting narrative debris. And so continue to build stories in which we can live.

Sfincterman – Niko Hendrickx

2 may 2024 – ongoing from 14.00 untill 23.00
4 may 2024 – ongoing from 14.00 untill 23.00
5 may 2024 – ongoing from 13.00 untill 18.30
Monty

In 2023, C-TAKT brought together director Karel Tuytschaever and visual artist Niko Hendrickx to create an additional video work for the sculpture ‘Sphincterman’.

‘Sphincterman’ is a fictional modern-day superhero. An abundance of superficial and one-sided information has caused mutations of several sphincter muscles in his body. What’s more, the mutations have consumed large portions of his body’s tissues, turning his body into an unlikely void.

Sphincterman possesses the supernatural power to use his sphincter muscles to bury everything that stands in his way under an all-suffocating mess of vulgarization, unempathetic drivel, ill-considered criticism and alternative facts.

The impressive montage of dance, sound, text and action in the video supports and strengthens the work of art.

You can participate in the installation of the art and video work in the Monty by taking over the role of Sphincterman and adding text to the artwork yourself.

Hexeneinmaleins – Nazanin Fakoor

3 may 2024 – 17.30, 19.30 & 21.00
wpZimmer

Hexeneinmaleins is a compelling work that focuses on the women’s data gap, tackling issues of invisibility and exclusion. It focuses on the systematic underrepresentation of women in data and research, which has serious consequences for health, well-being and opportunity.

Biases in data collection, historical and cultural factors, and patriarchal attitudes contribute to this knowledge gap. More than half of the population remains underrepresented in statistical strategies and overlooked in data collection, impacting various aspects of life, from public transport to healthcare.

The project aims to collectively defy erasure and explore the delicate balance between reality and fiction. Through an immersive installation involving artists and audiences, it delves into shared human fears and juxtaposes them with contemplations on the unknown. Hexeneinmaleins seamlessly combines sensory language, intellectual discourse, and scientific facts into a cohesive exploration of the female data divide.

Dry Dances – Kinga Jaczewska

3 may 2024 – 17.00, 19.00 & 20.30
wpZimmer

The practice of Dry Dances is based on Jaczewska’s interest in brutalist architecture. During her research into this architectural genre, she created a series of drawings based on the work of the Swiss/French architect Le Corbusier, which she now approaches as choreographic scores.

Dry Dances explore Le Corbusier’s own system of dimensions and proportions: The Modular. With its ambition to unite mathematics, the human form, architecture and beauty in one system, the Modular placed a 183 cm tall, attractive male body at the center of all Le Corbusier’s architectural compositions to achieve harmony. When introducing this system, Le Corbusier deliberately excluded measurements of the bodies of women and children, as he considered them a source of disproportionality and disharmony.

ANGRYBODIES – Guus Diepenmaat & Anouk Friedli

4 may 2024 – 19.30
Monty

DANCE, SHOUT, SHOUT and SWEAT along with ANGRYBODIES.

ANGRYBODIES is an explosive performance that celebrates the emancipatory power of anger. To the beats of Anne van de Star, Anouk Friedli and Guus Diepenmaat (For Real vzw) present political manifestos in the form of punk songs.

We are angry. And many with us. We don’t want to suppress our anger. She can be there. Because every political or social change starts with the opportunity to act, we consider venting anger and frustrations to be an essential part of activism. In this statement we feel supported and inspired by activists/writers such as Audre Lorde, Valerie Solanas and Marianne Donner. We are convinced that in a sick system, focused only on performance and optimization, destruction may be more constructive than self-help. With ANGRYBODIES we want to pay tribute to constructive anger and destruction.

But, Will I Remember? – Naghmeh Manavi

4 may 2024 – 20.30
Monty

978 / 5.000

Vertaalresultaten

Vertaalresultaat

In the lecture performance But, will I remember? Naghmeh Manavi examines the concepts of memory, identity and power dynamics in human relationships. She also reveals hidden forms of oppression. Her creative explorations draw inspiration from various fields including neuroscience, politics and narratology which she conducts through various media. The staging of the performance is threefold. She mixes different modes of presentation to shape the relationship between three layers of self-image, portrayed as characters. There is the narrator, the speaker (a live streaming video character who unfolds the story structure for the audience) and the third character, who is performed live on stage and focuses on the individual and collective aspects of human action. But, will I remember? is Manavi’s strange attempt to create an event to be experienced without a main story to frame it.

Proxemics – Salomé Mooij

4 may 2024 – 22.00
Monty

585 / 5.000

Vertaalresultaten

Vertaalresultaat

When does someone get too close? What is the right distance to the other person in a certain situation? And how do we know that? In the performance Proxemics Salomé Mooij explores the closeness between us. Inspired by the book The Hidden Dimension by Edward T Hall, she practices relating to the other and the space between us through different proximities, distances and approaches. Maybe sometimes it is a clumsy exercise, a clumsy one, sometimes it is unintelligible and sometimes too loud, it stays too far or comes too close. In any case, it cannot be done without the other.

A Deluded State of Mind – Liesbet Hermans

4 may 2024 – 14.00, 17.00 & 20.00
5 may 2024 – 13.00, 15.00 & 17.30
Monty

In A deluded state of mind, an intimate performance in public space, Liesbet Hermans and her performers explore the relationship between our body and our mind. According to her, we have similar thought patterns, but how much impact do they have on our lives? And what would happen if we gave these thoughts the attention they crave?

Join us on an intriguing walk through the city. Through headphones you listen to the inner world of the person you are following. You hear ideas about oneself, about his or her place in the world, about the world and about humanity. By going out together we discover our own thinking tendencies and a shared feeling of being together is created. Or are we just lonely individuals?

Speaking Characters – Wannes Deneer

2 may 2024 – 16.00
4 may 2024 – 14.00
Monty

Wannes Deneer studies speakers to understand how they work. He screws, knocks and cuts them open, analyzing the source of the electronic sound. Afterwards he makes his own loudspeaker collages. Various configurations are tested in prototypes using magnets, copper wire, cardboard, plastic foil, paper, rope, metal cans and stones. Every choice affects the shape and sound. By refining and adjusting, each speaker gets its own auditory and visual character. Together the assemblies form a polyphonic orchestra of idiosyncratic speakers.

Speaking Characters is a playful installation full of wonder for the physics and technology of sound. The composition repeats itself continuously and evolves from low to high, from abstract to concrete, from inaudible to audible and from visible to invisible. Spectators move freely through the installation and thus compose their own symphony.

Publiek Plan – CAMPUSatelier

5 may 2024 – 15.00
Monty

CAMPUSatelier works together with city residents on the imagination and experience of public space. They engage in discussions, design and build in a participatory and co-creative manner. In Antwerp they are working on the Public Plan project. In this way they collected various stories about public space: memories, experiences and dreams about the squares, streets and parks of Antwerp. Based on these stories, they will create a city map “Public Plan Antwerp N°1” in early 2024 as a first step to further map the city, from the bottom up, from the experience of the many things, people and events that Antwerp residents encounter every week. in the city.

During the week they assemble the various supplemented city maps, drawings and models into one gigantic cartographic patchwork, which they will ultimately carry out through the city together. In the Monty theater hall they share all the insights and results from the week with a diverse audience. A musical, planning, visual, literary, culinary meeting!

Oef! – Erica Camporesi

5 may 2024 – 14.00
Monty

Everything there is – the space, the sounds, the language and languages we sometimes share, the stories we tell, the smallest whispers and the biggest winds – everything there is – arises in a space of negotiation. That is risky, intimate and exciting. This is how we meet each other every day!

In the performative workshop Phew! we play with making sounds and understanding each other. In the simple setup of a foley studio we shape a soundscape with our bodies, voices and environment.

We open our rehearsal space to the public (8+) to play together with sound as an engine for imagination, using live amplifications of all kinds of objects and collective improvisations. Will you participate and bring your favorite sound?

Crash Test – Line Bogaerts & Ine Claes

5 may 2024 – 15.30
Monty

Crash Test is the new participatory performance by visual artist Line Bogaerts & music and performance maker Ine Claes. A project that brings drawing, sound and movement into dialogue with children between the ages of 9 and 12 who participate as performers.

In Crash Test, Line draws on a large sheet of glass. The drawings are projected on a projection screen that hangs in the room. Children are part of a ‘tableaux vivant’ as they move through the space. The children’s movements form shadows on the screen that merge with Line’s drawings to form a poetic whole. The project refers to driving and evokes a specific mode of attention: Alienation. Half asleep, half dreaming in the backseat, the street lamps, the trees,… transform into bizarre figures…

The alternation of meanings is a constant in the work. Concrete objects, bodies and visual aspects are transformed into a dream-like work in which memory and subjectivity are central.