Ictus, Eva Reiter & Michiel Vandevelde

Welcome to the 20th Klarafestival!

Under the title We Are Now, this special anniversary edition pays tribute to the here and now. No one embraces the magic of the moment more fearlessly than festival artist Patricia Kopatchinskaja. Wherever and whatever she plays, this Moldovan violinist and composer sets the stage alight. For her, every concert is a new beginning, a full moment in which anything can happen. Klarafestival 2025 paints a multifaceted portrait of Patricia Kopatchinskaja as a violinist, composer and inspiring presence.

In honour of our 20th anniversary, we are launching a new tradition: for one day, Mont des Arts will be transformed into the Muziekberg /Mont des Musiques. Alongside concerts and performances at various venues, a new ensemble will also see the light. Sound of Brussels Orchestra goes in search of the exceptional sound of our capital.

We live in challenging times, and some of the festival projects reflect on this. At the same time, they demonstrate how much hope can lurk between the notes of a Stabat Mater or a Dies Irae. How music can move and inspire us. For Patricia Kopatchinskaja, music is no abstract matter: ‘Music is there for us to do something with it. Even when it has no concrete message or function, it appeals to us. It wants to be heard. I don't believe in absolute music. Not really.'

Let the celebration begin!

Joost Fonteyne, intendant
Jan Raes, chairman
Chantal Pattyn, network manager

Who can say what the world is? The world
is in flux, therefore
unreadable, the winds shifting,
the great plates invisibly shifting and changing

— Louise Glück, Averno
   

Many worlds exist, and more are yet to come. In The Rise, musical bodies, dancing bodies, singing bodies, create a new world from a series of poems by Louise Glück, Averno. The master of ceremonies is Ruben Grandits, a deaf actor, a wizard of translation, who circulates meaning between language, sign and sound. He guides the ten performers through the mouth of the volcano Averno, which is also the place of passage between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Before our eyes are then reinvented: new instruments, new musical harmonies, and a grammar, a rhetoric, even a politics.
   
In The Rise, composer Eva Reiter and choreographer Michiel Vandevelde focus on the coexistence and interchanges of various worlds as they unfold on stage successively. In doing so, it is the process of translation that leads to the emergence of such new worlds. Through the translation and re-contextualisation of symbols, signs, gestures and sounds, new languages are created that eventually transform our perspective on a particular world.

At the centre of the piece appears Ruben Grandits, a young deaf performer who is the only person – although non-hearing – that is capable of transmitting the story to the public. His hands are equipped with sensors that directly translate his movements into sound. His signs, when speaking to us, serve as a basic source for the world of sound and movement. Vice versa, music is translated back into visual signs, making the piece accessible to deaf people. The Rise focuses on echoes and mediation. It exemplifies modes of communication that simply would not exist without mediation.  

The Rise is based on the poetry of Nobel prize winner Louise Glück, whose publication Averno serves as the main material for the libretto. Averno, a crater lake in Italy, was believed to be the entrance gate to the underworld. In her poetry, Glück conjures up images of life and death, connecting the worlds of the living and the dead. Like the surface of the lake, which serves as a permeable membrane into that parallel world, we will create parallel and intermediate worlds through the ways in which these poems are performed.


In The Rise, we neither see nor hear any traditional musical instrument, but only newly constructed, self-developed ones that form the basis of the score and stage set. All instruments were developed with the aim to translate movement into sound directly — sometimes collectively. The ensemble consists of four dancers, four musicians, one singer and the narrator, forming a ‘homogeneous’ group with echoing material. Together, they form a ‘choir’, which takes on a decisive function in its collective role and increasingly appears as a new community.



The mutual echoing of musical information and sign language – this whole circulation of meaning – allows for various ways of reading and accessing this piece. The inability to understand certain perspectives shouldn’t be felt like a deficiency and does not need to be compensated. Indeed, The Rise represents the multiplicity of perspectives from which we generate our understanding. 

Ictus

Eva Reiter

Austrian composer, musician, artistic advisor and curator Eva Reiter studied recorder and viola da gamba at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna and the Sweelinck Conservatory Amsterdam. As a soloist, she has worked with ensembles and orchestras for both early and contemporary music. Her work as a composer has been performed at festivals such as Ars Musica, Wien Modern, MaerzMusik (Berlin), Darmstädter Ferienkurse and the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Reiter lectures on early music and composition and also teaches composition and experimental improvisation at the Musik und Kunst Privatuniversität der Stadt Wien. Since 2015, she has been a member and artistic advisor of Ictus.

Michiel Vandevelde

Michiel Vandevelde studied dance and choreography at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels and is active as a choreographer, programmer and author. In his work, he questions the dominant logic of the contemporary public sphere and searches for social, economic and cultural alternatives to transform it. His work as a choreographer has been presented at Viernulvier, Concertgebouw Brugge, PACT Zollverein, the Münchner Kammerspiele, steirischer herbst and the Wiener Festwochen, among others. Between 2017 and 2021, Vandevelde was artist in residence at Kaaitheater. From 2021 to 2022, he was one of the creative ambassadors of the city of Leuven. He is currently affiliated with DE SINGEL as a programmer.

Ruben Grandits

The Austrian actor and artist Ruben Grandits has roots in two cultures, that of the hearing and the hearingless. From childhood he has expressed his fantasy through drawing. In his visual work, consisting of tattoos, analogue and digital drawings, the four elements of nature, opposites, wisdom, development and expressive facial expressions play an important role. All his art is wordless and always arises from his deaf silence. As an actor in sign language, Grandits previously appeared on stage at the Viennese Burgtheater in Stadt der Affen by Lies Pauwels. He is currently studying graphic design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

Lore Binon

The Belgian soprano Lore Binon began her career as a violinist, but over time became increasingly passionate about the voice. In the meantime, she has emerged as a versatile singer on concert stages, in lieder recitals, music theatre and opera. As such, Binon seeks to avoid limiting herself to a certain style or specific genre, but uses her voice to highlight the expression of human emotion in all its facets. She is a founding member of the ensemble Revue Blanche, an unusual combination of soprano, flute, viola and harp. As an opera singer, she played the leading role in the world premiering production of Wim Henderickx's De bekeerlinge (2022) at Opera Ballet Vlaanderen.

Ictus

The Brussels-based contemporary music ensemble Ictus was founded in 1994 as the dedicated musical partner of the dance company Rosas. Comprising a flexible roster of soloists specialising in experimental music, Ictus collaborates regularly with larger ensembles such as the Brussels Philharmonic and Collegium Vocale Gent. The ensemble consistently bridges modernist, experimental, and alternative music and is renowned for its unconventional concert formats, which blend music, theatre, and dance. It has worked with choreographers such as Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Wim Vandekeybus, Fumiyo Ikeda, and Eleanor Bauer, as well as composers including Toshio Hosokawa, Steve Reich, and Gavin Bryars.