Brandon Lagaert’s performance
at Fabbrica Europa

The XXX edition of the Fabbrica Europa festival started on September 8th and will continue until October 12th in Florence, featuring numerous events in dance, music, and performing arts. With the participation of established artists and new talents, this edition highlights visionary female figures and provides an overview of the current state of performing arts. The aim is to capture the essence of the present and the land in this challenging time, going beyond time, history, stereotypes, and prejudices. The program includes multidisciplinary projects that explore contemporary challenges and identities, with events taking place in various locations in Florence. In total, the festival offers 26 days of programming with 56 performances, involving 35 companies and eight different venues.

Equilibrio Dinamico's group starts from the exploration of the present, particularly investigating our interaction with technology and the impacts it has on our lives.

For their new project, "Welcome to my funeral" the collective from Apulia has enlisted the collaboration of an internationally renowned artist, Brandon Lagaert, after collaborating with artists such as Jiří Pokorný, Igor Kirov, Matthias Kass, Clément Bugnon, Marco Blázquez, Riccardo Buscarini, and Aida Vanieri, thanks to international exchanges supported by the Teatro Pubblico Pugliese.

As a multidisciplinary artist, Lagaert has dedicated himself to his own research after collaborating with Peeping Tom for ten years, creating his own style - perhaps less spectacular and more introspective compared to Peeping Tom's aesthetic canons - which often finds its basis in play to stimulate the creativity of the dancers, mixing dance styles ranging from contemporary to urban, a style that we particularly find in this performance.

In the creative process, Lagaert starts from the individual performer, whom he does not try to shape to conform to his own idea - as he explains in the talk following the performance - because each dancer already has a world and an imagination within themselves that can only enrich the collective work.

As we enter the room, we find four performers on stage, lying on the ground in white jumpsuits (white is the dominant color in the costumes of Equilibrio Dinamico, in this case designed by Franco Colamorea). The VR headsets they wear and other elements on stage, such as lights and a sort of giant power supply in the middle of the scene, immediately transport us into a future that is no longer so dystopian because it is already present.

Slowly, the dancers move, as if awakened by a world that comes alive in their heads, their reality. They proceed in jerks with robotic gestures, they agitate and struggle against external forces that take over, or interact with each other in multiple situations ranging from hatred and domination to love, in an atmosphere that is now clearly familiar to us from the countless films made on this subject.

But in reality, VR is used here as a pretext to reflect on the new ways in which people interact and on power dynamics. The company's choice is not to outline yet another version of a future that is on the threshold of the door, but rather to show the new mechanisms that are generated in individuals.

First of all, there is isolation, like the world of hikikomori, who choose to distance themselves from society to spend most of their time locked up at home, a phenomenon that started in Japan but now involves more and more people in Europe as well. There is domination and violence, depicted in various scenes - exemplary is the one in which one of the performers tries to rebel by taking off the headset, while the others try to force her to wear it. And there is fear because, although this world is now familiar to us, we still do not know what its true effects are, especially on an interpersonal level. There is also massification, the phenomenon of society becoming more and more uniform, slowly erasing the individual.

The experience is made even more immersive by Felix Machtelinckx's soundscaping, which becomes an additional narrative element, contributing to the audience's imagination in the vision of simulated reality. It is interesting how sound is used to create multi-dimensional landscapes, such as limiting it to one side of the stage or increasing and decreasing its intensity depending on the moment.

The performers emphasize in many ways the dependence on technology, which has become pathological. They only wake up with technological means, as happens to one performer who comes to life when her head is crossed by a fluorescent headband.

The dramaturgy is carefully crafted in every detail: everything is newly created, from the music to the lighting design, but it could be further developed (the performance lasts half an hour), although it succeeds in its purpose. As the title suggests, welcome to our funeral.


Rough translation from an article written for the website klpteatro.it