Peeping Tom / BE

4 October 2022 7 p.m.

Slovak National Theatre Drama Hall

Peeping Tom is a Belgian dance theatre company, founded by Gabriela Carrizo (I/AR) and Franck Chartier (F).

Everything at Peeping Tom starts from a hyperrealist setting. The creators then break open this realism and begin to defy the logic of time, space and mood. You become the witness – or rather, the voyeur? – of what usually remains hidden and unsaid, you are taken into subconscious worlds and discover nightmares, fears and desires. Presented using a rich imagery, a fascinating battle arises, against one’s environment and againstoneself.

Since its foundation in 2000 in Brussels, Peeping Tom has presented its creations around the world. The company has received several important awards, including and Olivier Award in the United Kingdom for 32 rueVandenbranden, a Patrons Circle Award at the International Arts Festival in Melbourne as well as several selections for the Belgian and Dutch Theatre Festivals.

Peeping Tom is supported by the Flemish Authorities.

www.peepingtom.be

Gabriela Carrizo

Gabriela was ten years old when she started dancing at a multidisciplinary school that had, at the time, theonly group of contemporary dance for children and teenagers. Under Norma Raimondi’s direction, the schoolwent on to become Córdoba’s University Ballet, where Gabriela danced for a couple of years, and where she created her first choreographies.

She moved to Europe when she was nineteen, and over the years she worked with Caroline Marcadé, Les Ballets C de la B (La Tristeza Complice, 1997, and Iets op Bach, 1998), Koen Augustijnen (Portrait intérieur, 1994) and Needcompany (Images of Affection, 2001). She never stopped working on her own choreographies, and these years saw the production of a solo piece, E tutto sará d’ombra e di caline, and Bartime, acollaboration with Einat Tuchman and Lisi Estaras. She also created the choreography for the opera Wolf (2002), by Les Ballets C de la B. She plays a leading role in Fien Troch’s movie Kid (2012), and in 2013 she created the short piece The missing door (2013) for the Nederlands Dans Theater – NDT 1 in The Hague. In 2015, Carrizo created The Land, a collaboration with the Munich Residenztheater. More recently, she worked with Franck Chartier on 31 Rue Vandenbranden (2018) an adaptation with Le Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon of Peeping Tom’s original. The new piece opened the prestigious Biennale de la Danse de Lyon in 2018. In 2022,Gabriela will direct her second short piece for Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT 1).

Gabriela has been the artistic director of Peeping Tom, along with Franck Chartier, since they co-founded the company in 2000.

Franck Chartier

Franck started dancing when he was eleven, and at the age of fifteen his mother sent him to study classical ballet at Rosella Hightower in Cannes. Between 1986 and 1989, he was a part of Maurice Béjart’s Ballet du 20ème Siècle. The following three years, he worked with Angelin Preljocaj, dancing in Le spectre de la rose at the Opéra de Paris.

He moved to Brussels in 1994, to perform in Rosas’ production Kinok (1994), and he stayed on, working on duos with Ine Wichterich and Anne Mouselet, as well as in productions by Needcompany (Tres, 1995) and Les Ballets C de la B: La Tristeza Complice (1997), Iets op Bach (1997) and Wolf (2002). In 2013, he created 33 rue Vandenbranden for the Göteborg Opera, based on Peeping Tom’s 32 rue Vandenbranden, and he developed the choreography for the opera Marouf, Savetier du Caire by Jerôme Deschamps at the Opéra Comique de Paris. For Nederlands Dans Theater, he directed The lost room in 2015, for which he received the prestigious Dutch price ‘Swan Most Impressive Dance Production 2016’. 2017 marked the world premiere of The hidden floor, his second collaboration with the Dutch company. More recently, he worked with GabrielaCarrizo on 31 Rue Vandenbranden (2018) an adaptation with Le Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon of Peeping Tom’s original. The new piece opened the prestigious Biennale de la Danse de Lyon in 2018. In 2021, he directedDido & Aeneas, a collaboration between Peeping Tom, Le Concert d’Astrée and the Grand Théâtre de Genève.

Franck has been the artistic director of Peeping Tom, along with Gabriela Carrizo, since they co-founded the company in 2000.

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DIPTYCH

The missing door and The lost room

Concept and direction: Gabriela Carrizo and Franck Chartier

Performed by: Konan Dayot, Fons Dhossche, Lauren Langlois, Panos Malactos, Alejandro Moya, Fanny Sage, Eliana Stragapede, Wan-Lun Yu

Artistic assistance: Thomas Michaux

Sound composition and arrangements: Raphaëlle Latini, Ismaël Colombani, Annalena Fröhlich, Louis-Clément Da Costa, Eurudike De Beul

Light design: Tom Visser

Set design: Gabriela Carrizo, Justine Bougerol

Costume design: Seoljin Kim, Yichun Liu, Louis-Clément Da Costa

Confection costumes: Sara van Meer, Lulu Tikovsky, Wu Bingyan (internship)

Technical coordination: Giuliana Rienzi, Pjotr Eijckenboom (creation)

Technical engineers: Bram Geldhof/Ilias Johri (svetlá / lights), Tim Thielemans/Jonas Castelijns (zvuk / sound)

Stage management: Johan Vandenborn (javiskový manažér / stage manager), Clement Michaux

Production interns: Lisa Gunstone, Robin Appels

Tour manager: Amaury Vanderborght

Production manager: Helena Casas

Communication manager: Sébastien Parizel

Company manager: Veerle Mans

Based upon Adrift, created with the dancers of NDT I: Chloe Albaret, Lydia Bustinduy, César Faria Fernandes, Fernando Hernando Magadan/Spencer Dickhaus, Anna Hermann, Anne Jung, Marne VanOpstal, Roger van der Poel, Meng-keWu, Ema Yuasa/Rena Narumi, with artistic assistance by Louis-Clément Da Costa, Seoljin Kim and Yi-Chun Li.

Production: Peeping Tom

Co-production: Opéra National de Paris, Opéra de Lille, Tanz Köln, Göteborg Dance and Theatre Festival, Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles, deSingel Antwerp, GREC Festival de Barcelona, Festival Aperto / Fondazione I Teatri (Reggio Emilia), Torinodanza Festival / Teatro Stabile di Torino – Teatro Nazionale (Turin), Dampfzentrale Bern, Oriente Occidente Dance Festival (Rovereto)

With the support of: the Flemish authorities

Distribution: Frans Brood Productions

Diptych: The missing door and The lost room was created with the support of the Tax Shelter of the Belgian Federal Government

MEMORY AS LABYRINTH

As the lights comes on the audience is plunged into a man’s mind: his life is passing before him like a film—or maybe it is the film of lives other than his, some past, others still to come. And so, in the cabins and hallways of an ocean liner, begins the labyrinthine voyage that is Triptych. In this trilogy, time, memory, and premonition revolve around the illusions, utopias, and lost loves of blinded characters who act out their own fiction. Uncontrollable forces set them adrift at each stage of their search.

In Triptych, the characters, lost in time and space, are continually drifting away and searching for one another. When they embarked on this voyage in pursuit of an ideal they were full of hope, but reality led them towards an uncertain destiny. They try to find a path through the wanderings of their thoughts while reviving and reliving their memories—or creating new versions of them, open to distortions. Triptych thus reveals a melancholy nostalgia for the future.

The characters’ inner quest is reflected in the scenography. They are isolated, lost in the encompassing darkness of the stage, in a labyrinth of missing doors, lost rooms, and hidden floors. The scenography was conceived as three successive film sets. A triple huis-clos in which the characters try in vain to create a new version of their illusory reality.

This filmic aspect manifests itself likewise in the show’s soundscape, which is dotted throughout with Foley effects: a falling glass, a door slamming, a beating heart, a metronome, the creaking and grinding noises of the ship. They act as so many anchor points while the characters are sucked in and ejected, while time vibrates, stagnates, fragments, and manifests itself differently for each of the figures onstage.

Gabriela Carrizo and Franck Chartier experimented with changing the filmic sets from one scene to the next in order to get the transitions to unfold as an autonomous dramaturgical force. Hence the man at the end of the second set, who remains alone on the large bed while the technicians work around him to mount the third. His chagrin expands exponentially, and literally becomes a puddle of tears, a theatrical “Lacrimosa.” In Triptych, this intermediary dramaturgy is an intimate part of the maze- like wanderings into the past and the future.

In the third and final set of Triptych, the old man’s mourning man takes on mythic proportions: his puddle of tears becomes the ocean in which an ocean liner shipwrecks. For the passengers, their utopian voyage has turned to its opposite: the forces of dystopia have prevailed.

Triptych is a reworked version of three short pieces that Peeping Tom created for the Nederlands Dans Theater. Gabriela Carrizo directed the first part, The Missing Door, while Franck Chartier directed the two installments that followed, The Lost Room and The Hidden Floor. Carrizo and Chartier wanted to bring these pieces into the Peeping Tom repertory to be able to continue performing them. Together, the choreographers reimagined the pieces for the dancers of their company. In that sense, Triptych shows how different bodies, idioms, and working methods can not only overlap, but also mutually nourish one another.

Yet another layer is to be found in the new team of performers that Peeping Tom selected especially for the characters of Triptych. Carrizo and Chartier focused on the new group’s distinctive combination of technical qualities, which straddle both dance and theater. With their own physical vocabulary, the new dancers will trace new lines of memory, not only across Triptych, but across the company as well.