PROTOCOL Première @Meakusma + KANAL - Centre Pompidou Kick Off
Unfolding among the audience as a slow-burning crescendo, from silence and stillness to pounding drums and electronic intensity.
MEAKUSMA FESTIVAL | 03 - 06 Sept. '26 | INFO | LINE-UP | TICKETS
A four day festival in the city of Eupen in East Belgium with live performances, DJ sets, installations, workshops, and much more.
- PROTOCOL PREMIERE:
Saturday 05 Sept. '26 | 20:00
KICK OFF KANAL - Centre Pompidou | 28 - 29 Nov. '26 | INFO
Ten exhibitions in Brussels spanning art and architecture, collection displays, group exhibitions, site-specific installations and performances.
- PROTOCOL PERFORMANCE:
Saturday 28 Nov. '26 | 18:00
Sunday 29 Nov. '26 | 18:00
PROTOCOL
In PROTOCOL the dancers and musicians play together with anticipation and escalation, in the middle of the dance floor. Electronics by Ofer Smilansky, musicians like percussionist Ruben Martinez Orio and all-rounder Eva Reiter and the dancers Mooni Van Tichel, Elsa Tagawa, Robson Ledesma and Magdelaine Hodebourg, They move from minimal sounds, gestures, and silence to an overwhelming, intense climax that keeps growing.
The performance explores how modern society creates and relates to new “gods,” such as AI, authoritarian leaders, climate change, and the Ego. It reflects on a crisis of meaning in which belief, rather than objective truth, shapes reality.
Who are the new gods of our time? Or what?
In an era when the status of facts and truth is shaky, the term “gods” has again become an intriguing one. The designers of AI themselves do not fully understand how AI works, and for now it is largely about the marketing of expectations: AI, then, is a matter of belief.
The same applies to populist, authoritarian leaders who refuse to be constrained by reality and demand absolute faith: whether Trump, Netanyahu, Putin, or Kim Jong Un. Climate change is such a vast and sprawling crisis that its existence is not a matter of belief, but our relationship to it is; abstract, requiring conviction.
Individualism, social media and neoliberalism have turned the Ego into something divine: we are our own gods and create our own image.
A Collective Ritual
In The Disappearance of Rituals (2019), South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han traces festivals back to their ancient Greek, ritual origins. Festivals were then an exception to the regular course of everyday life, an interruption, a distinct intertime for contemplation and processing.
In the search for the place of theatre, dance, and performance in our current crisis of meaning, the (music) festival/party/club is the ideal context, also to create a shared space with the audience, who are taken along on the trip of the performance. DJ and percussion work together to build tension and pressure through sound and to generate dynamics: aspects familiar from club nights or concerts, but here serving a different purpose.
A true collective ritual, pushing towards and perhaps even crossing a boundary together.
The role of drums in ritual forms such as Noh theatre thus flows into the techno beat which, since the 1990s has been a more recent musical-ritual shaping of an ever-accelerating, dystopian world. The beat is the driving force.