FIELD / Minus 16

With FIELD / Minus 16, Opera Ballet Vlaanderen presents a diptych that stimulates reflection and lets everyone go home dancing.

Until recently, Kirsten Wicklund was a member of our ballet company and in parallel she was working hard as a choreographer. Now she returns with FIELD, her first major creation for Opera Ballet Vlaanderen. Musicians from OBV's Symphonic Orchestra will perform the Eighth String Quartet by Dmitri Shostakovich and the ‘Melodia’ from the Sonata for Solo Violin by Béla Bartók live. To this incantatory music, Wicklund and her team open a portal to a mysterious mirror universe. A soundscape by Jean Delouvroy and Ivania Carpio's abstract, geometric set catapult the spectator into a space that seems to exist outside time. Dimensions like movement and light also merge in Irina Shaposhnikova's almost fluid costumes.

After the interval follows Minus 16: perhaps the greatest hit by living legend Ohad Naharin. Since its premiere in 1999, Minus 16 has become a canonical work of contemporary dance. It has already appeared on stages all over the world, and now finally with us. Minus 16 is an unpredictable kaleidoscope that sometimes moves and sometimes makes you laugh. To this end, the dancers of Opera Ballet Flanders immerse themselves in Naharin's idiosyncratic movement language gaga, balancing between expressive power and vulnerability. Musically too, Minus 16 transcends expectations: with infectious Latin music, pumping techno beats or the intimacy of

Chopin, the performance crosses genre after genre.