Biography
Kyoko Scholiers graduated from Studio Herman Teirlinck in 2003 and works as an actor and producer with, among others, De Roovers, Het Toneelhuis, Comp.Marius, TheaterAntigone, HETPALEIS and BRONKS. She plays in Any Way the Wind Blows (Tom Barman), Rosie (Patrice Toye), Stille Waters and De hell van Tanger (Frank VanMechelen), among others. Together with Louis van der Waal and Maarten Westra Hoekzema, she founded the unm collective in 2007. The trio creates location performances that have been acclaimed by the press, such as Tussen hond en wolf (2009) and The house that built us (2012) with choreographer Koen De Preter. In the meantime, Kyoko Scholiers, together with Ruth Becquart, is creating the installation BRIEF (2011), a slowly turning mill with audio fragments of a year of handwritten correspondence with people from all over the world. BRIEF won the Dioraphte incentive prize and continues to tour as an installation for public space to this day. In 2015 she created Bastaard, an existential-comic investigation into her own alleged descent from Napoleon Bonaparte. The multimedia theater performance was praised by the press and toured intensively in Flanders and the Netherlands. Kyoko is currently working on Misconnected, an installation with audio fragments of telephone conversations with people who are disconnected from society in one way or another. This installation of quirky telephone booths will premiere in the summer of 2017.
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Photo: Dries Segers
In residentie Misconnected
16.06.2017 – 16.06.2017
Theater maker Kyoko Scholiers had a self-built telephone booth travel around for a year. She brought the box to men, women and children who are disconnected from society in one way or another. The telephone wire is the symbol of the social connection that the callers cut, whether voluntarily or not. They are prisoners, refugees, vagrants and homeless people, but also prostitutes, patients and unlucky people. These are children and young people who grow up without mom and dad around. They are (ex-) sect members, hermits, monastics and loners of all kinds. For an entire year, Kyoko spoke to each of them for one hour every season. Kyoko processed the recordings of conversations into five-minute sound fragments, for an installation of four idiosyncratic telephone booths that move slowly along a track. The spectator takes a seat in a booth. Phone numbers are written and scratched on the wall – numbers of people you won’t find in the phone book. Here and there they also left a message: one cryptic, the other direct. The spectator picks up the receiver and dials a number. The telephone booth slowly starts to move and for five minutes the voice of an unknown caller resounds, with words and sighs that he or she confided to Kyoko during the year. What casual passers-by see is an absurdly intriguing landscape of telephone booths moving slowly back and forth. An alienating place that will force both active and passive spectators to look and listen to the world differently.