Playground

This year’s Playground festival edition features work by Cécile B. Evans, Helena Dietrich & Janneke Raaphorst, Julien Prévieux, Agnès Geoffray, Benjamin Seror & The Masks, Zhana Ivanova, Falke Pisano, Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa, Cally Spooner, Dominique Guilliot, Julian Weber, buren, Guy de Cointet, Fabrice Samyn, and Meryem Bayram.

For the eleventh consecutive year, STUK and M are joining forces to organize Playground. From 16 until 19 November, both locations will host the best of both worlds with a mix of the performing and visual arts. The arts festival is again presenting several (Belgian) premières by Falke Pisano, Helena Dietrich, Julien Prévieux, Agnès Geoffray, Benjamin Seror, Julian Weber, Fabrice Samyn and Meryem Bayram. A new book is also being published with a retrospective of ten years of the Playground Festival.

At M, Dutch artist Falke Pisano will reflect on the subject of time. Based on a short story by Edgar Allen Poe, she will transport you to Vondervotteimittiss, a village where life is regulated by a tower bell. Cally Spooner will be joined by sixteen collaborators to run an improvised business in the halls of the museum. This “rehearsal” is part of the artist’s exploration of connections between social and economic organizations. Is there a missing link in the museum collection? During a tour at the museum, Dominique Guilliot goes in search of those spaces of imagination and fills them up with missing songs, jokes, stunts and objects. Finally, there will be three short interpretations of Guy de Cointet’s last, never previously staged performance The Bridegroom Suites.

At STUK, Benjamin Seror will present his new band The Masks. In his late night show, he will transport you back to LA in the 1930s. Accompanied by appropriate music, he will recount murder mysteries with the famous philosopher Wittgenstein as the detective trying to solve the cases. Belgian artist Fabrice Samyn has created a tour with seven little “breath pieces” that explores the significance and poetry of breathing. In Helena Dietrich’s work, you will find items of clothing that change your identity when you wear them. For Playground, Agnès Geoffray is screening two videos: Sutures and Suspens and Syncope. She investigates the ambivalence of gestures and their dramatic potential at the intersection of photography, video and performance.

What is the importance of the medium of performance today? What are the challenges? And what is the role of Playground? We asked artists and curators who have performed or attended the festival over the past decade to reflect on these questions. Their answers, along with a double interview with curators Steven Vandervelden (STUK) and Eva Wittocx (M - Museum Leuven), have been brought together in a new publication. It offers a unique retrospective of ten years of the Playground Festival in words and pictures.

Playground is curated by Eva Wittocx and Steven Vandervelden

Press contacts:
M: Veerle Ausloos, T +32 (0)16 27 29 38 / veerle.ausloos [​at​] leuven.be
STUK: Joeri Thiry, T +32 (0)16 320 355 / joeri.thiry [​at​] stuk.be

Playground is part of Corpus, network for performance practice. Corpus is Bulegoa z/b (Bilbao), CAC (Vilnius), KW (Berlin), If I Can’t Dance (Amsterdam), Playground (STUK & M, Leuven), and Tate Modern (London)

Corpus is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union