Ghost Writer and the Broken Hand Break
“What is your true matter of practice?” ghost writer Raimundas Malasauskas asked Miet Warlop once. “Electric jellyfish”, she said. “In transition. From tension to attention, from breathing to singing, from focus to staring, from staring to starring. Vibrating with the smallest detail in galaxy. And there is no frame to add, only gravity. In obeying its pull I will stick one of my hands to the heaven and the other one to the ground. My voice chords will tremble, but I will stay calm. My right ear will tune to the left, and my left one – to the right. Boundlessness will kick in. Without ever stopping the movement I will start singing songs we wrote about matters of life, death and shapeshifting. I will not be teaching wet plaster how to dry this time. Two or maybe more bodies will be spinning around their axis next to me, but keep in mind – it is not me who is in the center, neither you nor anyone else whose biography you wanted to use. Their speed will be different. They will be in all kinds of futures and pasts, making sounds with their instruments and tongues, all aligned with their feet. No culmination will clap on a horizon – the horizon is in circle too. When a time will come to stop, we will look at our own palms and break the spell of never-ending transition. The truth is always somewhere there.”
“What an odour of suggestions to follow,” the ghost writer thought. The songs turned out to be about illusion, perceptual gags, invisible break ups, self-optimisation, present and now that it all started, nowciousness. Nothing remained true to the cyclical order of things.
“Every once in a while you can experience a performance reminiscent of a uniqueness often missed by so many others. Ghost Writer and the Broken Hand Break by Miet Warlop is one such anomaly. In experiencing this performance, something in your being is created and triggered, something that makes your heart beat just a bit faster – because you are not just a viewer, but also an active participant in its birth.” — Evelyne Coussens (De Theatrekrant)
studied Multimedial Arts at the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten in Ghent, she lives and works between Ghent, Berlin and Brussels. Her multiple award-winning work ranges between the fields of performance and installation. Warlop usually leads the audience into surreal worlds and weird experiments with perception. In 2012 she created Mystery Magnet, a performance which premiered at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels and has been shown more than a hundred times around the world to date. Since then, Warlop created the solo performance Dragging the Bone (2014), Fruits of Labor (2016) and Amusement Park (2017). In 2017, Warlop was invited by Brussels-based BOZAR to revisit her successful piece Mystery Magnet as part of an Yves Klein retrospective. This was followed by Big Bears Cry Too and Ghost Writer and the Broken Hand Break.
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