Meyoucycle
Meyoucycle (me-you-cycle) is a political science fiction fantasy concert musical about expression in the age of hyper-capitalism and technological mediation. Personal ads and old-school letters, chat-bots, tweets, poetic terrorism, untameable rants, sound, image, song and dance collide in a rumination on contemporary and near-future life and the intense forces and interfaces that shape it.
The title “Meyoucycle” is a near homonym for “musical,” as if pronounced with a strange accent, which is to say that Meyoucycle creates something foreign to what can be identified as a musical, but with familiar ingredients. The piece combines music, dance, and text; and it seems to tell a story: in the near future, a group of poetic terrorists and emotional hackers have all dropped into anonymity. They dwell in the Dark – the dark web, the dark woods, the unknowns, the subconscious, the intuitive shadow of hidden knowledges. They escape the all-pervasive system of communications media that expropriates expressions between people and transforms it into profit. In order to maintain true freedom of expression and prevent that others profit from their every move, they choose to lose their identity and transform themselves constantly. Sliding through different genres of performance and music, inhabiting different forms of speech and physical appearance, they generate a continually shifting horizon of possible meanings, constantly escaping fixity.
Meyoucycle is a song-cycle written in collaboration between choreographer/performer Eleanor Bauer and musician/composer Chris Peck. Bauer and Peck have worked together for many years, over great distance. They learned to use the reality of distance and digital communication actively. Processing various source-materials from magazine articles to dreams, folding in three contributions from absent guest song-writers, developing the choreography with the performers and musical arrangements in dialogue with Ictus ensemble, the material itself is a churning cycle of me’s and you’s. As a “me-you-cycle,” the performance ultimately acknowledges that all understandings in the theater are created somewhere between the stage and the public.
is a performer and performance-maker based in Brussels, Belgium. Originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico, she studied dance, choreography, and performance at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels. Her latest work is a trilogy, consisting of A Dance for the Newest Age (the triangle piece) (sextet, 2011), Tentative Assembly (the tent piece) (nonet, 2012) and Midday & Eternity (the time piece) (trio, 2013). The trilogy deals with triads such as past-present-future and science-politics-spirituality to approach the wholistic nature of dance and choreography. In 2013 she launched BAUER HOUR, an episodic variety show created uniquely according to date and location, running monthly at Kaaistudios in Brussels, punctually on tour elsewhere, and on the Bauer Hour Vimeo Channel. Bauer is an artist in residence at Kaaitheater in Brussels from 2013–2016. In 2016 she premieres Meyoucycle, a new concert-performance in collaboration with Ictus Contemporary Music Ensemble.
Chris Peck is a composer, computer musician, and improviser who often collaborates with contemporary dance and theater. His career in the performance world has included collaborations with artists such as Beth Gill, John Jasperse, RoseAnne Spradlin, David Dorfman, Abby Yager, Ming Yang/Dance Forum Taipei, and Jeanine Durning; performances at venues such as The Kitchen and the Whitney Museum, and festivals such RoseLee Goldberg’s Performa biennials and the Venice Biennale. Recent projects include co-creations of music-dance works with LA-based choreographer Milka Djordjevich (MASS, 2015) and Brussels-based choreographer Eleanor Bauer (Meyoucycle, 2016) Peck is also working on a new music-theater piece with Eleanor Bauer, NEW JOY, set to premiere at Schauspielhaus Bochum in 2019.He holds an MA from the Electro-Acoustic Music program at Dartmouth College and a Ph.D. in Composition and Computer Technologies from the University of Virginia. He currently teaches music courses in the Global Arts Studies Program at the University of California, Merced, where he also directs the Experimental Inter-Arts Ensemble.
Credits
developed with the performers
developed with the performers
Inga Hákonardóttir (vocals, dance),
Tarek Halaby (vocals, dance),
Gaël Santisteva (vocals, dance, saxophone, shaker),
Gerrit Nulens / Ictus Ensemble (drums, percussion),
Gwenaelle Rouger / Ictus Ensemble (piano, synth).
Kobe Van Cauwenberghe / Ictus Ensemble (guitar, bass)
Tom Pauwels,
Jean-Luc Plouvier
with guest contribution by Gérald Kurdian
developed with Chris Peck and the performers
developed with Eleanor Bauer

remaining tickets at the evening box office
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