Plage tattoo / circumstances


1999 - 2000

Plage Tattoo/Circumstances combined theatre, music and dance. The performance is a meeting between the blue, melancholy atmosphere of Zita Swoon’s music and poetry and the playful, intuitive creativity of Koen Augustijnen and Tamayo Okano of Belgian dance company. Les Ballets C de la B. It’s the story of two formations who are known for their non-conformist approach and their need to explore and innovate that find each other.

In Plage Tattoo/Circumstances three musicians and two dancers tell the story of a woman and a man, each with their own loneliness, fears, doubts and dreams. It’s a story about two people who live besides each other and drown in each other, about a man who saves a woman and how they suffocate each other.

For this project, the members of Zita Swoon composed new music, while Aarich Jespers created several sound installations especially. The combination of both elements led to a soundtrack with instrumental and unpredictable songs which integrated rough sounds. It was important to Stef Kamil Carlens that the music of Plage Tattoo/Circumstances sounded cold, hard and almost robotic. It had to constitute an icy frame in which the dancers could evoke an atmosphere of indifference and misunderstandings.

Quotes:

“Plage Tattoo/Circumstances is a beautiful performance, in which human aggression has seldom been given such a piercing shape. Unlikely as it sounds, a theatrical rose is born from this violence. Fragile in the storm of time generated by Zita Swoon, but proud in the performance Augustijnen and Okano give us.”
Rinus van der Hijden for Brabants Dagblad 1999

“The music mostly borrows from rock and funk. Sexual music, served raw and clever. Plage Tattoo, created fairly intuitively and ultimately rectified by coach Johan Simons, is at its strongest when the dance engages the music and the musicians.”
Peter Van Tyghem for De Standaard 1999

“The beauty of this production lies mostly in a few short scenes – Zita Swoon singer Carlens, dressed in women’s lingerie, takes pity on an exhausted Augustijnen, with a particularly beautiful pieta as a result – and in the music.”
Steven Heene for De Morgen 1999

Collaboration

Coproduction