steal you for a moment

The collaboration between Francisco Camacho and Meg Stuart goes back to Stuart’s earliest works, especially Disfigure Study (1991). Through different projects they developed a deep, personal connection. For example, Stuart’s acclaimed solo work BLESSED (2007) – created with and for Camacho. Now they are back on stage together for the first time in thirty years. 

Their duet is inspired by the mysterious Nuraghe ruins on the island of Sardinia. Around the end of the ancient Nuraghe civilization stone giants guarded the island’s shores – traces of a rich culture that was slowly crumbling. Camacho and Stuart look beyond the museum walls and investigate the gaps, the absences in the historical record. What remains?  

Visual artist and performer Gaëtan Rusquet, sound designer Vincent Malstaf, and lighting designer Frank Laubenheimer create a landscape that, like the Nuraghe ruins, could come from the future. Or even exist outside of time. In this space, Camacho and Stuart excavate artefacts of emotion. In this, they are assisted by Rusquet, who manipulates and transforms the space live. In doing so, they seek contrasts in size and scale: minimalist poses burn with emotion, anger and power are concentrated and contained. With their voices, they express a lost language and weave connections between universes. They meet each other in rhythm and repetition, rewinding and speeding up, encoding and deciphering, making and breaking patterns. By listening to the past, they construct an archaeology of the present in which the distinction between the mystical and the everyday doesn't matter anymore.  

• Meg Stuart (she/her, 1965) is a choreographer, dancer, and director, living and working in Brussels and Berlin. She has created over thirty productions with her company Damaged Goods, founded in 1994. Stuart’s work moves freely between the genres of dance, theatre, and visual arts, and is nourished by an ongoing dialogue with artists from different disciplines. In 2018, Stuart won the Golden Lion ‘Lifetime Achievement’ award at the Venice Biennale. 

• Francisco Camacho (he/him) is a choreographer, dancer, and founder and artistic director of EIRA. He studied dance and theatre in Portugal and New York and is one of the key figures of the contemporary dance movement that emerged in Portugal in the late 1980s. He has directed 22 group pieces and 20 solo works, as well as 11 works as a co-author. His choreographic work has earned him some of Portugal’s most prestigious awards. The National Theatre and Dance Museum in Lisbon recently dedicated a five-month exhibition to his career. 

• Gaëtan Rusquet (he/he) lives and works in Brussels as an artist and performer within performance, dance, theatre and visual arts. His artistic work often focuses on the relationship between the body and space, through a medium, and on the need for movement linked to it. Within these experiences, he wants the audience to share in a simultaneously visual and performative experience.