Archive NEXT 2021

Shown and Told

Meg Stuart (United States) & Tim Etchells (United Kingdom)

Minimum age 16+
60 minutes

When writer and performance artist Tim Etchells uses texts, he first executes them in a drawing or sends them as a tweet. Time after time he is astonished how different the impact and the meaning of the same words are when presented in a different medium.

In Shown and Told  he challenges choreographer Meg Stuart, another icon of contemporary performing arts. There is no music, no scenery, no coherent story. Stuart and Etchells let themselves be led by cross-fertilization and exchange. Which life will their ideas lead in a totally new context ? What originates from the interaction of their work ?

Shown and Told is a sparkling fragile collage built on improvisation and associative leaps. Together the two performers look for a relationship between movement, image and the body as a performance instrument. Using vivid images, both physical and linguistic, they create a dialogue that is alternately tough, moving and comical.

Tim Etchells is the artistic leader of Forced Entertainment, with which he showed Real Magic at NEXT 2018. The English company makes self-willed projects that provoke thought through humour and won the prestigious International Ibsen Award. The American Meg Stuart is the driving force of Damaged Goods and works from Brussels and Berlin. For her career she won the Golden Lion at the Biennale of Venice in 2018.

Shown and Told  is a clever, quaint and thought-provoking duet about communication.”  (Mary Brennan, The Herald Scotland)

Introduction at 19:30 (NL)

CREATION, PERFORMERS Tim Etchells, Meg Stuart / LIGHT DESIGN Gilles Roosen / COSTUMES Annabel Heyse / PRODUCTION Damaged Goods