Atelier II out at sea: a bit of digging.
Someone is heading for the sea dyke. Looking for Jozef Wouters: a man wearing an orange jumpsuit. The working man operates a digger. He is digging holes, creating mountains. Which is the man and which is the machine? The machine roars and digs in the sand. The one watching Jozef Wouters from the dyke, thinks: “I have seen this man before. By the train, in a stadium (in the middle of the city), on the beach. Thrice art.”Digging is reciprocal; alternating between brains and sand (toes are tiny diggers). An Vandermeulen
-
We know Jozef Wouters (°1986) as a theatre creator, scenographer, architect, initiator of the‘Zoological Institute for recently extinct species’ and one third of MennoMichielJozef, a collective that collaborates in different ways and in varying combinations (Menno Vandevelde is an engineer, Michiel Vandevelde is a dancer, and Jozef is the subject of this portrait).
-
By the train. Jozef Wouters is a man of big ideas. In 2009 he built a TOWER for the commuters between Brussels and Leuven: an ever growing construction reaching for the sky. For one month he resided in a field near the rail tracks and attempted to relay messages to the train passengers in a very short space of time.
-
In a stadium (in the middle of the city).Jozef Wouters is a man of broad ideas. In 2010 he began the building project Stadium, a construction that changed its form 5 times (a football pitch, a stadium hosting dance, bleachers,…) In all its incarnations, the shape of the construction always generated a focus directed at the centre of the stadium, specifically drawing attention to something small or something large, or creating a space for something yet to come into existence.
Four of the five Stadiums were built in public spaces. During Atelier I by Meg Stuart, this project was transposed into a theatre, creating a new space within a space. A group of dancers spent several nights improvising in the centre of the construction with the audience moving freely around the central performance area.
-
On the beach. During Dansand!, Jozef is out at sea with Meg Stuart for a second time. This time he has dug in: a new landscape created by digger machines. A landscape within a landscape. Construction materials are exchanged for sand sculpture. Two days in a row, this will be the space in which dancers move. Meg Stuart completes the cycle. This is Jozef Wouters.
blogdansand 