Work

Visual concept for “Petrushka “

(Joan Tower, Camille Pepin, Igor Stravinsky)

Collab with motion designer Ychaï Gassenbauwer

This concert celebrates the power of imagination: our fantasy translates what we see in the real world into a unique and individually coloured universe. What is real? What is illusion? What is imagination? What is reality?

Musically, each of the three works plays with our perception of reality in its own way: Joan Tower uses the strength of whimsically branching sequoias as a metaphor for the musical bath from which she distils her own voice. Camille Pépin uses a Chinese fairy tale as a mirror for our reality. In Petrushka, Stravinsky plays with roles, personas, and realities—until no one knows what the fairy tale was and what was the real world.

The visual layer enhances this sense of estrangement and invites the audience to invent their own parallel universe. New works by artist Ellen Vrijsen, inspired by the music, activate the spectator’s imagination. Motion designer Ychaï Gassenbauer takes this further, stretching the boundaries between the imagined and the real: images overlap, shift, blur, and flow into one another. What is reality? What is imagined? A parallel universe where music and image enter a dialogue.