Down the rabbit hole

Benjamin Verdonck
Wed 15/03/2023 - 20:00
Easy language
50'

Ticket prices

  • pay what you can: € 8 - € 12 - € 16 - € 18 - € 20
  • € 3,20 for UiTPAS with reduction rate
  • no other reductions

Benjamin en de Boze Wolf

This season, Leuven Jazz and the puppet theatre festival Boze Wolf Festival join forces once again. All-round artist Benjamin Verdonck will perform no fewer than five times in Aarschot and Leuven.

For his two performances in Leuven, Benjamin has invited a few jazz musicians with whom he engages in a dialogue, improvises and gives his visual shows a magical sound. The names of the musicians will be announced together with the Leuven Jazz programme.

Down the rabbit hole

Bigger, faster, bolder and more frantic than any of the other table theaters in his repertoire, Verdonck’s new show is a cross between a meticulous choreography and a jam session gone wild. A physical duel with hundreds of ropes and planes, nose-flute solos, armpit sweat rings, screaming and screeching guitars.

Down the rabbit hole brings it on. You’re sitting in a red velvet theater chair but know that nothing prevents you from jumping up and bobbing along.

support: Empty Apartments

Empty Apartments is the solo project of guitarist/producer Jolan Decaestecker.

In an attempt to free ambient from its narrow definition of being background music, the project investigates concepts as ’surprise’ and ‘dynamics’.
Which, in the best case, give the listener a choice to experience the music in the foreground or background.
The building blocks for these compositions consist of tapeloops, iPhone recordings, soundscapes and improvisations complemented with arrangements.

To forge these elements into one whole, Jolan fell back on experimental concepts from the world of soundscapes, jazz and modern classical music.

“Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers. Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity. The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not change the stars of course, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky. The problem of time is like the darkness of the sky. Every event is inscribed in its own time. Events may cluster and their times may overlap, but the time in common between events does not extend as law beyond the clustering. A famine is a tragic cluster of events to which the Great Plough is indifferent, existing as it does in another time.” - John Berger

Press

"In between, Verdonck operates the panels and slides of a miniature theatre, continuously creating new perspectives and views. Nothing is what it seems in this magical diorama: an endless ballroom disappears into a black hole, a red field creates the illusion of the Big Bang. The fluid alternation of colours, shapes and light draws you in like a painting by Mark Rothko. You give yourself over to Verdonck’s captivating magic." (**** Alexander Hiskemuller in Trouw, 25 January 2018)

More info

with Benjamin Verdonck dramaturgy Sven Roofthooft decor Benjamin Verdonck, Lucas Van Haesbroeck light design Lucas Van Haesbroeck costume Filip Eyckmans production Toneelhuis photo Kurt Van der Elst