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Festival TransAmériques
May 22 to June 5, 2025
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Built to Last

MEG STUART | DAMAGED GOODS

A reinvention of history and dance, a masterly confrontation of 5 simple humans in contact with the masterpieces of 12 great composers. A feat of pure choreography by the prodigious Meg Stuart.

Details

HEROIC BODIES
A mobile that evokes the solar system, a dinosaur in kit form, primitive-futurist tribes in a museum display case, music with the rousing force of a tidal wave. Meg Stuart has built a time travel machine and confronts her performers with classics by Beethoven, Xenakis, Dvorak, Rachmaninoff and other seminal composers, placing her simple humans in the face of monuments that incarnate history and transform it into a future full of promise. In the rolling fire of a perpetually renewed dance, they meet the challenge with brio. Whether symphonic, minimalist or expressionist, they gape at icons of the past, affirming their absolute modernity.

Working for the first time with existing classical music, the prodigious Meg Stuart creates an experience poles apart from Maybe Forever (FTA, 2008). In Built to Last, she puts Western heritage through the wringer to extract the essence of human grandeur. A feat of pure choreography.

Credits

PRODUCED BY DAMAGED GOODS + MÜNCHNER KAMMERSPIELE
CHOREOGRAPHED BY MEG STUART
PERFORMED BY DRAGANA BULUT + DAVIS FREEMAN + ANJA MÜLLER + MARIA F. SCARONI + KRISTOF VAN BOVEN
DRAMATURG BART VAN DEN EYNDE + JEROEN VERSTEELE
MUSIC DRAMATURG ALAIN FRANCO
SOUND DESIGN KASSIAN TROYER
SET DESIGN DORIS DZIERSK
COSTUME DESIGN NADINE GRELLINGER
LIGHTING DESIGN FRANK LAUBENHEIMER + JÜRGEN TULZER
VIDEO PHILIPP HOCHLEICHTER

PRESENTED IN ASSOCIATION WITH USINE C WITH THE SUPPORT OF GOETHE-INSTITUT MONTRÉAL + MINISTÈRE DES AFFAIRES ÉTRANGÈRES D’ALLEMAGNE

WRITTEN BY FABIENNE CABADO
TRANSLATED BY NEIL KROETSCH

PREMIERED AT MÜNCHNER KAMMERSPIELE, MUNICH, APRIL 28, 2012

 

MEG STUART | DAMAGED GOODS (Bruxelles + Berlin)

Imperfection, Failure and Beauty

The American choreographer and dancer Meg Stuart splits her time between Brussels and Berlin. After a few years in New York, she moved to Belgium where she created her first works starting in 1989. Her staging of Disfigure Study was a mix of dance and theatre, and featured fragmented, twisted bodies, inspiring the name Damaged Goods, the company she founded in 1994. Intense and dramatic in her initial pieces, her dance focused on states of being where the body disintegrates, struggles against itself, falls, thrashes, flails and crawls. Weakness and flaws lie at the heart of her work – a source of emotion and empathy, and also of beauty. Underlying her characters’ vulnerability are desire and determination, which motivate their actions. With time and the effect of diverse influences, the artist often referred to as “the choreographer of disaster” has become more serene in some of her later dance pieces.

Full biography