Heine R. Avdal (N) en Christoph De Boeck (B)

Better luck this time! Heine R. Avdal was ill in November, so his performance of terminal was cancelled, but now it's back on the programme again. It is his second production. Avdal is a dancer and choreographer and sees man as a container through which signals or presences are able to travel. His starting point is particularly influenced by a personal confrontation with illness in his family. The 'terminal' concept shows itself clearly in someone who is dying: while the body has already assumed the form of a dead object, medical measuring instruments still record a certain consciousness in the form of electric impulses. A strange presence sometimes seems to intercept the lines of communication in our nerve centres, so that a routine action degenerates into a nervous contraction of the muscles. In this performance the body is shown as a neurological system through which information sometimes flows very inadequately. Avdal cooperated with the theatre academic and sound designer Christoph De Boeck. The sound design is an attempt to translate the idea of a ghostly presence. Signals that move through the air and through rooms and bodies are captured, manipulated and transmitted anew. The sound is developed further by the frequent and repeated digital processing of recorded errors in software and system. As a whole, it is a conceptually powerful work that combines video, photography, music and movement in an extraordinary way. Here, mechanical and human information processing are sometimes independent, sometimes merge into one another, sometimes touch each other tangentially, and so on. Linked to this performance, from 10.30 pm you can watch a video of the working process behind and performance of terminal in the Green Room.