WE the Eyes
WE, the EYES is a large-scale dance performance and the second work in ICK's WE-Cycle. Ten performers, live percussion, and a dominant spherical screen move a micro-society from total darkness toward new forms of seeing.
“The audience can expect an intense experience: the performance is like a high mass full of singing and rituals.”
learning to look, to see, and not to see
Somewhere there has been fire. The survivors gather: masked, hooded, carrying lamps on their foreheads like a third eye that has not yet learned to open. From this moment of collective blindness, WE, the EYES unfolds as a ritual of seeing: seven states of being, seven times a gong sounds, seven times a sphere above the stage oracles with frenzied images between reality and fiction.
A priestess - voiced by Pink Oculus - presides over the transformation, her sinister singing equal parts warning and invitation. Live percussion drives the bodies forward through rock, body sound, electronic and classical music, never settling, never allowing stillness to become comfort.
Van Leer's video fills a towering spherical screen; a digital oracle cycling through compound eyes of insects, news flashes of floods and destruction, images hovering between the mythological and the immediate. The screen does not illustrate the performance, but watches it. It watches us. As the dancers gradually shed what blinds them, the visual world shifts with them, until the sphere becomes something other than a mirror: a horizon that keeps moving.
The eye sees out and is seen into. Across cultures and centuries the symbol of consciousness itself. To lose sight can be a catastrophe or a beginning. WE, the EYES holds both. The performers begin literally covered, and move through the night of the performance toward something like vision. Not the vision that recognises and moves on. Something slower and more dangerous: the kind that changes what you are…
WE, the EYES is the second work in the WE-Cycle by ICK Dans Amsterdam, after WE, the BREATH. Co-produced with Le Manège, Scène Nationale de Maubeuge (FR) and Ravenna Festival (IT).
“Video by Ruben Van Leer on the backdrop: square light boxes versus wavy frequencies — an extra character in dazzling interaction with the sleek, razor-sharp lighting design.”
credits
| Concept & Choreography | |
| Concept & Choreo | Emio Greco | Pieter C. Scholten |
| Dramaturgy | Florian Hellwig |
| Video | |
| Video | Ruben Van Leer |
| Performers in Video | Helena Volkov, Sedrig Verwoert, Edward Lloyd, Suzan Tunca, Maxinie van Lishout |
| Performance | |
| Vocals & Performance | Pink Oculus |
| Dancers | Denis Bruno, Dennis van Herpen, Victor Swank, Hiroki Nunogaki, Sixtine Biro, Jordaine Lincoln, Giacomo de Luca |
| Percussion | Agostinho Sequeira & Dániel Bolba (reserve: Francisco Guerreiro) |
| Rehearsal Director | Jesus de Vega & Dereck Cayla |
| Sound & Light | |
| Sound Design | Salvador Breed |
| Light | Henk Danner & Israël Del Barco |
| Design | |
| Costume | Clifford Portier |
| Technical Producer | Israël Del Barco |
| Production | |
| Production | ICK Dans Amsterdam |
| Co-production | Le Manège (FR), Ravenna Festival (IT) |
| Photography | Zani Casadio |
filmmaker & media-artist
