It was a pleasure to have Cyriel Lucas and his crew in Het Bos. They are making a very energetic piece called DOEM : Fragment #4 - A Collective Experiment Dancing on Electronic Music. Be part of this performance on the 13th of October during Vruchtbare Grond.
We asked Cyriel some questions:
Where are you from and how does that affect your work ?
I was born in Brussels and grew up in the countryside of Wallonia. Historically the country had been pretty important in the musical development of techno music in Europe. In the 90’s this industry from Detroit and then the UK was passing through Belgium and started therefore to be influenced by its style. As a queer youth born in the mid 90’s I could feel the influence of the belgian touch and my relationship with electronic music was continuously rising up until today. I also spent a lot of time in France, a country that particularly embraced the rave movement and developed it into its own concept of the Free Party. It is moreover there that I experienced Techno for the first time. I can therefore easily identify how my origins had been influencing my work
What do you expect to learn from a residency in Bosacademie ?
This residency was for me the opportunity to share my evolutive practice with other performers and also with extra participants I didn’t necessarily know. What I was looking for is therefore to learn how to communicate about my work and how I can share my tools. This idea of transmission while creating a safer space is mandatory to me because DOEM is a research process that is thought of with different outcomes of participation. Two of these are the performative aspect that we will experiment at the Vruchtbare Grond, and the building of workshops that I want to establish in the future. This residency was bringing the privilege of exploration about those two questions.
When is your favorite time of day to create ?
I’m a night bird. Of course
Describe how art is important to society.
I still have this little hope that art can be a tool for changing and improving our society. I consider art as being something political, even if it isn’t a main guideline of a project, even in the world of entertainment. Because the way we build a project, the persons we work with and the spaces in which we perform are already saying a lot about how a system works. The purpose of my own work is to trigger the inner sensations of both the audience and the performers, to (re)connect to our feelings and to allow the emotions to circulate in our bodies and between them. Something that is perceived as a taboo. To work with the concept of Rave is to remind the importance of a space made for pure expenditure, out of the societal expectations and masks. It’s a matter of (re)generating a social frame where everything is possible in the limit of respect and love towards each other. It is hence a way of claiming these spaces that are originally and inherently queer and inclusive, that became political because they happen to be canceled and banned for not fitting the norm.