MARC VANRUNXT & STEF VAN LOOVEREN: Adagio

Marc Vanrunxt had aspired to make a new dance film, a creation that would focus on the presence and energy of the dancer and celebrate the human body in movement. After seeing the work of Stef Van Looveren, he had an immediate sense of recognition—of atmospheres, a certain wildness, the shameless, the uninhibited—and experienced a strong desire to enter Stef’s universe. A duet was on the horizon.

While transferring his vision (of bodies) and his choreographic approach to Van Looveren, Marc Vanrunxt has been working over the last decade with five male dancers on a short dance film, Adagio. Van Looveren recorded the images and manipulated them through an exhaustive editing process. 

Adagio displays a variety of inclusive, non-binary bodies that enter a dialogue with each other in a continuous slowness, and the same can be said of the recorded images. Adagio does not recite a ‘truth’ but aims to be a question mark, searching for a spectrum of possibilities and plausible answers. This is a piece that searches for authenticity in a world of limits and oppression and breaks through structures that society systematically places on people and bodies.

#wildness #shamelessness #continuous slowness #dancing as a question mark

director: Stef Van Looveren * choreography: Marc Vanrunxt in close collaboration with Igor Shyshko, Kevin Fay, Malique Fye, Mustaf Ahmeti en Nathan Ooms * performers: Charlotte De Waegenaere, Rashidam Nassyrova, Oriana Mangala Ikomo Wanga, Judith Willems, Marie Willems * music: Daniel Vanverre * assistant director: Elisabetta Silvestri * with the support of De Studio * special thanks to De Studio and IPEM, Institute for Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music.

©Raymond Mallentjer