Opening weekend Blind Spot

Saturday 14 and Sunday 15 August was the opening weekend of location-responsive performance Blind Spot. The performance was presented as an ‘aanhacker’ to the annual Kaapstad Festival in Tilburg. The Brabants Dagblad was present at the premiere and wrote about it. 

The brickwork on the south side of the former cantonal court is an ideal place for a performance that is a cross between dance and parkour, the sport in which participants make their way through and over buildings in a city. Acrobatics by three dancers formed the spectacular finale to ‘Blind Spot’, a one-and-a-half-hour walk past places where short dance performances were presented. These were places you would otherwise pass by without noticing them.

Jelena Kostić, the creator of these open-air performances, had chosen appropriate mottos, such as ‘travelling less to discover more’ and ‘we don’t always fully see with our eyes open’. Embedded in music by Breda composer Dyane Donck, these mottoes and other texts were heard over ‘silent disco’ headphones. The music varied from long notes and chords and slowly beating rhythms to exciting guitar sounds and gritty bass, through which the sounds of passing traffic filtered. The lyrics told of the places the group visited, and of the history of the city, its textile past, the twelve thousand people who worked in the factories in Tilburg at its peak.

The choreography was tailored to the location where it was performed. The Interpolistuin was the first stop, a place that apparently few people know you can walk around freely in: according to Kostić, it is always quiet. For the three dancers, the garden was a real playground. They ran to and fro like children, climbed trees, dived through the grass, chased each other. All under the watchful eye of a white-clad older woman, to whom they returned again and again.

Read the full article via the website of Brabants Dagblad [in Dutch].