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Speech of Love – Absence

Elisabeth Tambwe (CG/AT)
Fri 7 Oct ’22 and Sat 8 Oct ’22
A plea for passionate love.
Fri 7 Oct ’22
and
Sat 8 Oct ’22

A dance performance about intense and passionate love, our longing for intimacy and the fear of losing our loved one. Based on Fragments d'un discourse amoureux by Roland Barthes, a plea for passionate love. 

Choreographer Elisabeth Tambwe confronts us that passionate love is often an unknown situation, a state in which you can get lost, which you cannot control and which you endure. For Speech of Love – Absence she took as artistic starting point Fragments d'un discourse amoureux by Roland Barthes, a plea for passionate love. Barthes divides love into 'figures of thought', texts without underlying narrative, hierarchy or development. They are wordless states into which love brings us.

For the loved ones, the absence of the other, the beloved, determines everything. People who want to be in control of their live, who are afraid of falling or losing the other, will avoid passionate desperate love. Speech of Love – Absence is an artistic manifesto about the intense enjoyment of passionate love, our desire for intimacy and passion and the fear of losing our loved one. Tambwe visualizes in dance, performance and music the elusiveness, passion and ecstasy of love and the tear you feel when your loved one is no longer there. 

Duration: 90 min

Part of

About Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe 

Elisabeth Bakambambamba Tambwe (Congo, 1971) combines dance and visual arts. In her work she seeks combinations between modern contemporary dance and performance, often in combination with visual art. In this she collaborated with choreographer Robin Orlin and with Serge-Aymé Coulibaly, George Momboye, Graciane Finzi, Cyril Viallon, Faustin Lyniékula. In 2005 she founded her company Dixit in Lille, focusing on the crossovers between modern dance, performance, visual arts and experimental music.

Elisabeth Tambwe previously performed her solo dance Mon Cœur Balance in the Netherlands at Julidans Next in 2005. In 2006 she and her company Dixit created the choreography Concerto pour Corps Bruyants, which was performed at the Festival Le Manifeste, at the Royal Flemish Theater in Brussels and Le Vivat in Armentières. 

In 2009 she choreographed React in Silence, Please at WUK (Kulturhaus for performance, theater and dance) and Dschungel Theater both in Vienna. She performed in A World full of Butterflies, it takes Balls to be a Caterpillar.... Some Thoughts on Falling choreographed by Robyn Orlin (part of Afrovibes Festival 2017). An important theme in her choreographic work is the manipulation of the body in European and Congolese dance. She focuses on the sensitive and vulnerable dimensions of the body and the 'concept of 'normality', which she criticizes as tyrannical and demeaning. Who decides what is 'normal' and what is not?

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