Figures in Flight

What if you want to fly so badly… that you just give it a go? Figures in Flight is an imaginative dance performance for young audiences about big dreams, small setbacks and the courage to start again.

Choreographer Shane Urton drew inspiration from the marvellous machines of the Antwerp artist Panamarenko, which can’t quite manage to fly. We meet Pepto Bismo, who falls from the sky and lands inside his own head: a place full of ideas, doubts, hope and imagination. Other characters also appear there to help him search for ways to perhaps fly after all. Because failure is not an end, but a starting point.

The choreographer weaves elements from the Greek myth of Icarus – who flew too close to the sun and crashed – with the playful world of Panamarenko and his famous sculpture Pepto Bismo on Antwerp’s Sint-Jansplein. In the music, the mischievous waltzes of Johann Strauss II are distorted and interwoven with cheerfully humming engines and whirring propellers. Figures in Flight is an ode to everyone who dares to dream.

The performance is preceded by a short film about the artist Panamarenko, specially created for a young audience (approx. 20 min.). This double bill centres on Panamarenko’s extraordinary world, where technology and art go hand in hand, and which is infused with boundless imagination.