Simon Van Schuylenbergh — Dark Habits
Je weet wat men zegt: de weg naar Compostella is geplaveid met goede voornemens, en Oostende is niet in één dag gebouwd.
Under the name Dark Habits, performance artist Simon Van Schuylenbergh together with 18 different individual artists went on a D.I.Y. pilgrimage for entrepreneur artists, to reflect on the remnants of community, spirituality, and magic in times of spiritual crisis and hyperindividualism.
This pilgrimage resulted in a combination of actions – some solo, some collective: a bankrupt nun-cult with strange hallucinations, mystics trying to find a job on the black market, a gender neutral oracle with a business in aura-points, a kind of powerbottom jesus having a talk with his own ego, a couple of starving artists begging to a fountain of inspiration for some magical drops, a desert in conversation with the ghost of freedom of speech, and also a strange frog-cult.
Tonight, together with performers Micha Goldberg, Castélie Yalombo, Rosie Sommers, Hanako Hayakawa and Charlotte Nagel, and to a score by Loucka Elie Fiagan, Simon will continue this staged mission for meaning. Expect eclectic, exaggerated, silly, sacred, self-reflective, (un)symbolic performance art in a sistine chapel on a budget.
With the super official première set for this year’s Theater Aan Zee in Oostende, this Dark Habits performance for OUT of LOVE is a sort of try-out with a sort of first rough structure of what it sort of might become. Maybe. It’s complicated </3
about
Simon Van Schuylenbergh is a performance artist who, after graduating from KASK in 2017, participated in plays by Elsemieke Scholte, Leontien Allemeersch en Benjamin Abel Meirhaeghe to name but a few, after which he launched the Ne Mosquito Pas project, dedicated to short solo performances about / inspired by / aimed at failure. These days you might recognise him as the host of reverse-gentrification cabaret Anal Pompidou. Over the years Simon met many friends, allies, and accomplices – just look at that stellar cast for tonight! – and together with some of them he has performed at Beursschouwburg before, with German Staatstheater in 2022 and 2024. If you had the pleasure of witnessing any of the above, you'll agree that the ever searching, ever undoing, ever reinventing work of Simon Van Schuylenbergh needs to be experienced to be understood. And even then …instagram.com/vanschuylenberghsimon/
Performing Simon Van Schuylenbergh, Micha Goldberg, Castélie Yalombo, Rosie Sommers, Hanako Hayakawa, Charlotte Nagel / Music Loucka Elie Fiagan / Setdesign Veronika Bezdenkynykh, Remco Wuyts, Simon Van Schuylenbergh / Lightdesign Max Adams / Dramaturgy Nathan Ooms, Anna Franziska Jäger / Production Kunstenwerkplaats / Coproduction Toneelhuis, Beursschouwburg, De Brakke Grond, Kunstencentrum BUDA, Theater aan zee, ANAL Pompidou / Flyer design Maya Strobbe / Promo Image Wannes Cre Artistic Research Micha Goldberg, Chiara Monteverde, Marivi Gazeta, Lydia Mcglinchey, Loucka Elie Fiagan, Luis Ramirez Munoz, Sophia Rodriguez, Helena Araujo, Nathaniel Moore, Marco Labellarte, Castélie Yalombo, Rosie Sommers, Désirée Cerocien, Hanako Hayakawa, Rojda Gülizar Karakus, Karina Villafan, Rodrigo Batista, Charlotte Nagel / Partners Research Kunstenwerkplaats, Atelier210, CAMPO, Brakke Grond, Kunstencentrum Buda, Gouvernement, decoratelier, the queer self-defense group Athens / Special thanks Bart Van Schuylenbergh, Castillo, Siska Baeck & Steven Sommeryns
image solo: © Bjorn Floréal
image group: © Maryan Sayd
