SMELLS LIKE CIRCUS

Set your alarm clock! We serve breakfast with a short film and some interesting speakers.

Guests are Geert Belpaeme, Micha Goldberg, Rosmary Velasquez, Giulia Piana & Castélie Yalombo.

Moderation by Valentina Barone

After the successful shows Plock! and murmur, Grensgeval is creating KORROL, a new circus performance for everyone aged four and above. KORROL will be the final part of the trilogy about art and creation.

In KORROL, an acrobatic architect composes space with tonnes of concrete. Jonas builds towers, the towers become a city, a desolate plain, a human being. But every time he tries to lay the last brick, his work proves unfinished. Jonas balances precariously on wobbly towers, jumps on his hands from stone to stone. But no matter what he tries, everything remains so stiff and still. Until he puts on the concrete: donning heavy shoes, he orchestrates a small ballet, in a duet with a massive ball he skims past his audience. He (re)builds up his whole body. Even when he almost collapses under the weight, Jonas just finds the freedom for a duet between toe and little finger. 

​When Jonas places his concrete head in the hands of the audience, they become co-bearers of his creation. In a world of traveling and tangible sound, they remold the world together. Result: a dazzling new circus sound theater in which the audience is immersed. With drumming blocks, a petrified acrobat and dancing concrete.

You are cordially invited for a candlelit dinner. 

Every year, since forever, Miss Sophie celebrates her birthday: a table for 5, delicious food and good wine of the abundant kind, 4 empty chairs and a butler doing his best to fill the void. 

‘Same as last time, Miss Sophie?’ - ‘Same as always, James!’

A shot sounds
A bird falls
Three figures provide invisible feathers of a soft fading sound.

In Silly Symphonies, the players depict through sound a world where you as an audience witness a succession of unforeseen endings: from crashing cars to shot birds, from sinking fishermen to swirling paratroopers. 

Are they complicit in ending endlessly or do they provide sound for what would otherwise pass unnoticed?

Which imagination is shattered, which is slowly fading? Which whispers softly and reassuringly when all the sound disappears? 

Using the auditory medium of bruitage, Marius Lefever, Jef Van der Burght and Senne Vanderschelden tackle these questions in a playful, sometimes almost clownish way, without avoiding the darker corners of humanity.

Circus, stand-up and live art blended in a solo-cabaret of contradictions. Fierce, witty and uncompromising, this highly physical show interrogates personal, social and historical occupations of the female body and explores, literally, where such bodies are positioned and how we are meant to look at them. Expect scenes of nudity, aerial acrobatics, and explicit references to mythical reptiles and female sexuality.

Great friendship always has something loving, exclusive, direct. An alchemy that is just as inexplicable as carnal desire. In 'DOS' two bodies become the literal territory of the relationship between them. To the sound of Erkin Koray's psychedelic hit from the 70s, a humorous search for connection unfolds. Playing with the clown figure, the full register of ambiguity is opened up.

Alexander Vantournhout takes the stage as Thor wielding his own Mjölnir. Will the hammer be controlled? The relationship between performer and hammer soon becomes ambiguous. Where does he get the strength to manipulate this heavy hammer and when does the hammer take over and become uncontrollable?

A little stage like a little runway with a Chinese pole in mid. A man dress as woman while she’s a woman. Or a woman who’s a man who wants to be a woman, or also a woman deciding she’s a man playing a woman. A gender mix that create confusion.

A freedom taste. Free to be who you want. Without clichés. Play and be disturbed.

Whatever, Beyonce will sing Johnny’s hits on a dancefloor in fire, or reverse, or both…

One more time, Juglair will be a freak and a freaks’s announcer !

Three bodies weave through a tight system of shapes in a single repetitive pattern: the infinity loop. In this extremely physical and relentless performance, the stakes become higher and more challenging.

A plea for human fallibility for we are all clowns. Three performers return to the tradition of clowning to portray the intrinsic rage of being human. The clown's unsteady figure smashes its way through human history and beyond, with cheerful recklessness and pretentiousness.

Hypermodern post-pop-punk juggling. Juggling legend Wes Peden returns with a rollercoaster show that bends and twists the theatrical rules, in a set of inflatable structures and electro beats composed of rollercoaster sounds. Hold on for the ride of your life.

Bebe Books welcomes you to a world of spectacle and joy. Bring out your inner freak, let the sweaty, up-tempo beats lead you, and get excited for jaw-dropping performances. Bebe Books take you on an unforgettable journey into the early morning.

Bebe Books is an ongoing collective experiment that operates through shared agency in creative labor, care and friendship in the field of communication design and publishing. By working together, we resist the modern myth of a singular heroic designer - what Ursula K. Le Guin referred to as “the narrative of the arrow or spear.” We consider ourselves as a queer collective not merely as a statement of identity, but as that of methodology. Besides the fact that the majority of our constituents are gender-non-conforming, we use our creative capacity and resources to design a context – be it a book, a gay bar, a temple, or a political campaign – where diverse marginalized experiences and voices can be represented.