Appearance
Appearance is the first part of a diptych with Disappearance, with video staging by Ruben Van Leer. A children's choir, dancers of Ballet National de Marseille and ICK Amsterdam, and a solo pianist share a stage haunted by wolves; creatures of instinct and shadow, drawn slowly toward the light.
what emerges from the dark when you stop fearing it
The source is Mahler's Kindertotenlieder - Songs on the Death of Children - poems written by Friedrich Rückert in grief after losing two of his own children, set to music as a song cycle that has never quite stopped aching. Pianist Franck Krawczyk recomposes the score for this production, drawing also on Hanns Eisler and Leoš Janáček. Twelve children sing. Their voices carry what adult voices cannot: an unguarded quality, close to the surface, not yet armoured.
Van Leer's video staging moves through this world as through a dream at dusk. The threshold between day and dark where forms are not yet fixed. The wolf appears here not as threat but as symbol of what we have pushed away from ourselves: instinct, vulnerability, the knowledge that cannot be reasoned. In the projected world he creates, Van Leer draws the wolf slowly out of shadow: toward the light, toward the stage, toward us…
The dancers of Ballet National de Marseille and ICK hold the tension between the children's voices and the visual world, between innocence and what awaits it. Nothing in the work announces itself. It arrives, the way things arrive in dreams: already present before you noticed it coming.
“An ode to the power of intuition and vulnerability; qualities that - in today’s society - are gradually fading into dusk, like wolves that shy away from the light of day.”
credits
| Direction | |
| Concept & Choreography | Emio Greco I Pieter C. Scholten |
| Video Staging | Ruben Van Leer |
| Dramaturgy | Jesse VanHoek |
| Light Design | Henk Danner |
| Costumes | Clifford Portier |
| Performance | |
| Dancers | Dancers from Ballet National de Marseille & ICK |
| Children's Choir | La Maîtrise des Bouches-du-Rhône led by Samuel Coquard |
| Music | |
| Piano | Franck Krawczyk |
| Music | Gustav Mahler, Hanns Eisler, Leoš Janáček |
| Post-Production | |
| 3D Design | Julius Horsthuis |
| Post Facilities | Hectic Electric |
| Production | |
| Produced by | Ballet National de Marseille & ICK |
filmmaker & media-artist
