5th edition of the Artonov Festival in Brussels
The 5th edition of the ARTONOV Festival will take place in Brussels from 7 to 13 October 2019 in various Art nouveau, Art Deco and stunning architectural venues, making it a sensory journey where the architectural space becomes part of the art. With audience attendance increasing every year since the first edition, the festival will extend this year to a whole week. The event will present several exceptional international and Belgian interdisciplinary creations such as Carolyn Carlson’s new creation “The Seventh Man”, who has been invited following her remarkable visit in 2018, which was full of symbolic and poetic significance at the CAB Art Center.
For the first time, the festival introduces a modernist space with Olivier Strebelle’s former home-workshop, where company Le Geste qui Sauve presents a performance representative of the creative work promoted by the festival following a 15-day residency in situ. It’s a dialogue that promises to be a great mix of architecture and gestural theatre. The festival will also take place in a venue of contemporary architecture, the MAD Brussels Fashion and Design Platform. It’s a way to celebrate architecture as the mother of all the arts and to extend the festival’s interest to other periods and styles while preserving common themes. In a style that is both contemporary and highly sensory, writer Ryoko Sekiguchi and chef Sugio Yamaguchi invite us on a cartographic journey through the sights and sounds of the food we eat.
“L’intuition du geste” (The Intuition of Gesture) is the theme of this 5th edition. The movement of an artist’s body carries the intuition of the work as a whole and its creative force. The body is the common denominator and a true interdisciplinary element. The various artistic performances emphasise the importance of the body and gesture in the various disciplines.
For example, for the opening night at Villa Empain, the show “Il Corpo Dentro” pays tribute to the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus style. The result of a collaboration between world-renowned butoh dancer Atsushi Takenouchi and costume designer Sonia Biacchi of the Venice Centre for Theatre Research, this performance features costumes inspired by Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet and the Bauhaus style. It represents the shapes of space and creates a true architecture for the body.
Hôtel Métropole, a new partner of this edition, will welcome “La Tentation des Pieuvres”, a creation for a chef, four musicians and one hundred guests. “La Tentation des Pieuvres” attempts to create a form of contemporary communion between the arts and individuals, resonates with all the spectators’ and performers’ senses, and invites them to an original artistic and social experience.
At Atelier Colpaert in Schaerbeek harpsichordist Bernard Foccroulle will meet the contemporary painter Fabienne Verdier, known for her work on pictorial gesture and music, in an intimate and ephemeral dialogue where music seeks its ally in the image.
Eliane Reyes and Michel Draguet take over Saint-Gilles Town Hall to talk about Fernand Khnopff’s work, while Pierre Hamon takes the audience to a new world with his South American whistling vases at Maison Autrique.
Les Halles Saint-Géry and Les Ateliers des Tanneurs, two places typically known to Brussels residents, welcome the public. In the first, composer Jacopo Baboni Schilingi offers several performances on the theme of the body and writing (this world premiere will be repeated in Tokyo in 2020 for Chanel) and the second hosts a family show, “Peau d’Âne”, a tale in verse and music based on texts by Charles Perrault and music by Lully.
This 5th edition testifies to the anchoring of the ARTONOV Festival in the European cultural landscape, thanks to original creations that will never cease to surprise the public and were created especially for exceptional venues of Brussels’ heritage.
