You wander through an unrecognizable space, perking your ears and squinting your eyes. A poetic universe. Echoing voices echo in the distance. A trombone calls from the darkness. A siren distorts into angelic song. Someone pulls a piano forward. A reminder of something, but nothing is quite what it seems. Everything you try to grasp, to understand, slips between your fingers. 

A Myth is a sensory, musical performance in which song, movement, percussion and brass come together in one large physical composition. Together with six performers, composer-director Mees Vervuurt (A Myth for Piano, VACUÜM) invites us to listen deeper, to experience. Interacting with the dreamlike, mythological world of A Myth, our relationship with the world around us is questioned. In this way, the performance questions one of the most persistent myths of our time: that man is central and nature is something outside of us. How are we, as human beings, in the world? What are the stories, the myths, that we tell ourselves to relate to what is around us? And what happens when we let those go? 

Music
Vervuurt’s music is at the intersection of attraction and repulsion. Harmonies and melodies evoke the memory of a vague dream of something we have heard once before, while the timbres, distances and intentions are simultaneously new, sharp, unexpected and dangerous. Reverberating arias and screaming sirens echo in A Myth. Intensely delayed baroque harmonies warp into the crackle of a start-up machine. Percussion and trombone create a hurricane of sound that eventually hushes into meaningful silence.

“Mees Vervuurt moved and surprised everyone with his beautiful production in the water basin. He is making an incredible career, both nationally and internationally, so we are proud to premiere his new creation.” – Guy Coolen, artistic director O.