Sometimes music refuses to sit still. It bounces across a basketball court. It pulls up a chair at the table. It creeps into puppets, bodies, glances and gestures. It doesn't just ask to be heard, it asks to be followed. With your eyes. With your body. With a slight uncertainty about who's performing here and who's watching or listening.

With HUNTER, Eat Me and L'Histoire du soldat, Flanders Festival Ghent presents three evenings in which music breaks out of the concert format. Not because something extra has been added, but because sound itself starts to move. The court becomes a score. The table becomes a battlefield. The puppet becomes a body. The violin becomes the stake in a pact. These are performances in which listening is anything but passive. Music grows muscles, hunger, rules, seduction and a touch of the devilish. It comes closer than comfort allows. Until listening no longer keeps its distance.

21.09 | HUNTER 

A basketball court. Eight voices. One hunt for the heart.

In HUNTER, composer, actress and pop singer Liesa Van der Aa brings the Berlin vocal ensemble B O D I E S and soprano Naomi Beeldens together on a basketball court. The lines are marked out, the rules seem clear, the referee blows the whistle. But before long, the game starts to tip off balance. Inspired by Björk's album Homogenic, HUNTER lets voices loop, collide, merge and pull apart. Beats become movement. The court becomes a score. What begins as a match slowly turns into a system under pressure: playful, precise and dangerously human. A performance about rules, roles, pressure and desire. A hunt, not for victory, but for the heart.

23.09 | EAT ME

A banquet where hunger never lets up.

A table is laid. Glasses are filled. The meal never quite makes it to the table. And yet everyone keeps going. One more bite. One more sip. Eat Me is a baroque banquet about desire, consumption and excess. Composer Jonathan Bonny lets Lully and Vivaldi collide with electronica and Britney Spears. Dominique De Groen writes text that circles around bodies, appetite and the strange economy of seduction. :mentalKLINIK builds a glossy arena where watching, listening and consuming come dangerously close together. With B'Rock and a cast moving between guest, host and accomplice, Eat Me becomes a sensory trip through elegance and unease. The question stays on the table: is too much ever enough?

25.09 | L’HISTOIRE DU SOLDAT

The soldier, the devil and a violin.

Stravinsky's L'Histoire du soldat is a compact masterpiece about a deal with the devil. A soldier hands his violin to the devil in exchange for a book that predicts the future. Sounds convenient. Naturally, it all goes wrong. The devil always reads the small print more carefully.

In this remarkable version, the Salzburg Marionette Theatre, Isabelle Faust & Friends and the visual world of Georg Baselitz come together. Puppets, music and story pull each other along into a modernist fairy tale that is as light-footed as it is ominous.