With En Route, you curate your own concert series choosing from nine unique musical worlds. From cabaret to romantic symphony, Arabic melodies or a vocal quartet, from Ukrainian singing traditions to electronics. Or do you prefer some French Baroque and an accordion virtuoso? Choose a route and experience a personal journey full of surprises and magic.
11:00 - The Uprising of the Facades — The Parade and the Parade Choir
Thomas Verstraeten and Opera Ballet Vlaanderen's The Parade literally makes the city change places. Two Ghent facades, one from the historic city centre and one from the Brugse Poort, are painstakingly reconstructed, break free from their terraces and travel through Ghent in a festive procession. Along the way, they are accompanied by local residents, musicians and a colourful city orchestra ranging from hurdy-gurdy to DJ decks.
What music belongs to a facade? What sounds from behind a frontage? Drawing on personal stories, urban memories and snatches of operatic repertoire, a city opera emerges for, by and with the people of Ghent and its visitors. Verstraeten transforms the procession into a grand ritual of reversal: city centre and periphery cross paths, the city holds up a mirror to itself and discovers what lies hidden behind its masks. We celebrate the arrival of the facades with the Parade Choir (which sings about the facades), a shared finale in which the city rings out one last time.
Want to join The Parade and sing along with the Parade Choir?Sign up here.
Timing
11:00 Departure De Karavaan
± 13:00 Arrival De Karavaan and the Parade Choir Location: Vrijdagmarkt and Fonteineplein Admission: free
Location: under the city pavilion, Poeljemarkt Free admission.
20:00 - Ways of [ ]
What does it mean to be human in a world where we must relate to other forms of intelligence? Audiovisual artist and composer Zeno van den Broek poses this question at a time when artificial intelligence is evolving at remarkable speed. With Ways of [ ], he creates an audiovisual composition that feels more urgent than ever.
In Ways of [ ], Van den Broek brings humans and machines together within a single musical and visual experience. The work was composed for two ensembles — HIIIT and Percussions de Strasbourg — as well as four digital ‘musicians’: self-playing percussion machines that perform both autonomously and in live interaction with the human percussionists.
To train these digital performers musically, Van den Broek fed their algorithms with rhythms drawn from industrial history: think steam engines, looms, and other mechanical systems. In this way, the digital players, like humans, learn from their predecessors and from the environment in which they perform.
Ways of [ ] unfolds as an audiovisual composition that suggests the emergence of a new kind of shared intelligence. You see and hear humans and machines gradually learning to understand one another: tentative at first, then increasingly fluid. Across three largely improvised sections, the performers discover their own voices and eventually arrive at a shared musical language.
With Ways of [ ], Van den Broek invites us to reflect on what intelligence really is, and what it means to be human.
Programme Zeno van den Broek – Ways of [ ]
[absorb]
[evolve]
[project]
Performers
HIIIT
Percussions de Strasbourg
Zeno van den Broek, compositie en visuals
Location: Wintercircus Admission: free
Fancy a seat and a drink afterwards? We have a limited number of tickets available. Book yours here.
