Simon Van Schuylenbergh — Dark Habits

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