Shelly Shonk Fiffit

Benjamin Abel Meirhaeghe / Toneelhuis
2024

On 25 December 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope was launched. This infrared telescope is the largest and most sophisticated space telescope ever, allowing us to look far and deep into the universe, but also into the past. Among other things, Webb will search for the ‘cosmic dawn’: the light of the very first stars that formed shortly after the birth of the universe.

“Through space the universe grasps me and swallows me up like a speck; through thought I grasp it.” (Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670) 

The infinity of the universe swallows us up, science searches but our imagination is absolute. What fascinates Benjamin Abel Meirhaeghe even more than the discovery of this telescope is the capacity of human beings to rise above themselves and the universe in their thoughts. Their capacity for invention. In this show, Meirhaeghe links the high tech of a telescope to the primitiveness of handcraft and manual techniques.

Our travel companion on this trip beyond the boundaries of the body and time is the music of the Italian composer Caterina Barbieri. Barbieri makes electronic music that is potentially
transformative and mind-expanding. To the sounds of the hypnotic Fantas (from the magisterial 2019 album Ecstatic Computation), the performers, singers and dancers give themselves over to the inexplicable and indescribable.

Shelly Shonk Fiffit promises to be an intense and ecstatic visual and musical trip through our inner world and the remote corners of the cosmos. Fiffit!

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Credits

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director

Benjamin Abel Meirhaeghe

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scenography, light

Zaza Dupont

Bart Van Merode

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music

Caterina Barbieri

 

dramaturgy

Louise Van den Eede

 

text

Jori(k) Amit Galama

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by and with

Fumiyo Ikeda

Bully Fae Collins

Eurudike De Beul

Alphonse Eklou

Nathan Felix-Rivot

Malique Fye

Faust De Winne

Hanako Hayakawa

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vocal coaching

Wouter Deltour

 

costume design

Sietske Van Aerde

 

production

Toneelhuis

 

coproduction

Tandem Scène nationale Douai

 

with the support of

de Tax Shelter van de Belgische federale overheid

via Look@Leo

 

internationale spreiding i.s.m.

ART HAPPENS