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Closing show, taken to new heights, leaves crowds speechless
The closing show at Brussels Stephex Masters has built a reputation of its own over the years. Always spectacular, always unexpected, and always one of those moments the audience looks forward to discovering. So when Thursday evening arrived, anticipation was already high. But this year’s edition did more than deliver on those expectations. It completely surpassed them.
For ten minutes, internationally renowned Theater Tol stunned the Grand Place arena with a performance created especially for Brussels Stephex Masters. Dancers, original music, dreamlike characters and, eventually, three giant bird cages with aerial acrobats suspended high above the arena had thousands of eyes looking skywards. Missed it? No problem: the spectacle returns on Saturday night.
Behind the creation is Theater Tol, a company that brings together dance, music, visual theatre and aerial performance. We spoke to Talitha De Decker, choreographer and artistic director, and Benjamien Lycke, composer and business director, about how those ten extraordinary minutes came together.
From one balloon to a whole new world
Against the vastness of the Grand Place, a little girl appears almost impossibly small, holding a single balloon. She seems lost in the enormous arena for just a moment. Then a violinist appears. Three mysterious figures follow and draw her into their world. What starts with one child and one balloon slowly grows around her until the entire arena seems to have slipped out of reality and into her imagination.
For De Decker, the creative starting point came from two ideas that Brussels Stephex Masters wanted the performance to carry: “everything is possible” and “keep dreaming.” Those words gave Theater Tol its direction. Rather than building a performance around a storyline that the audience has to follow, they wanted to create a succession of images and emotions.
“What you see is what you get,” De Decker explains. The audience is invited to surrender to the fantasy and give its own meaning to what unfolds in front of them. That approach is important for a company that performs internationally. The images have to work without explanation and without language getting in the way. A little girl holding a balloon, dancers releasing theirs into the sky or mysterious figures suddenly appearing in the darkness are images that can trigger an emotion wherever the performance takes place.
The music plays an equally important part in creating that feeling. “We create the music ourselves,” says Lycke. As composer, he builds the musical world around the choreography, allowing music and movement to develop together rather than adding a soundtrack afterwards.
When the cages take to the sky
And then there are the cages.
As the performance grows, balloons disappear into the night sky and three enormous bird cages suddenly emerge high above the Grand Place. Suspended beneath them are the mysterious figures who appeared earlier in the show, now soaring over the arena. It was the moment that had Thursday night’s crowd looking up in disbelief.
The cages were not simply taken from an existing show and dropped into Brussels. Stephan Conter had been clear in his discussions with Theater Tol: he wanted something unique for Brussels Stephex Masters. That request prompted De Decker and Lycke to look again at one of the company’s most spectacular aerial concepts.
Theater Tol had not worked with the cages for quite some time, but Brussels Stephex Masters felt like the right occasion to bring them back and create something new around them. What the public ultimately sees for barely ten minutes therefore brings together choreography, dancers, live performance, specially created music, aerial acrobatics, three enormous flying structures and a tightly timed technical production.
And just when the cages have made you think the show has reached its high point, there is one final surprise. Fireworks fill the sky, bringing the dream world back to what Brussels Stephex Masters is ultimately all about: a celebration of the horses, riders and heroes of the sport.
One more chance to see it
On Saturday evening, Theater Tol takes over after the prize-giving of the CSI5* presented by Audi, a 1.50m class with jump-off.
Make sure you don’t leave too soon. Once the horses have left the arena, it is worth keeping your eyes on the sky.
