In between violet and green

‘Somewhere between violet and green, that’s where the colour lies that connects everything, there, somewhere in infinity, between the tints of air and water.’ - Claude Monet, from a letter to Paul Cézanne, c. 1869.

On stage we see an architect and a photographer. He is busy with his self-designed models, she takes photographs and projects them. The audience witnesses both the craftsmanlike way the image comes into being and the result that this yields. As technicians of the imagination, Steve Salembier and Charlotte Bouckaert of Atelier Bildraum tinker with their world before the audience’s eyes. A world that gradually takes shape to the music of Thomas Smetryns, played by Jakob Ampe and Benjamin Dousselaere.

The starting point is Monet’s garden in Giverny and Les Nymphéas, the series of paintings that go with it. As the founding father of Impressionism, Monet was the first to break away from the salons and deliberately take his easel out into the natural surroundings. For Salembier and Bouckaert it is above all the interweaving of painting and gardening that is their source of inspiration. Monet did after all prove that image and space, garden and landscape, are inseparably linked and susceptible to manipulation.

It is the garden and the landscape that are the main characters in In between violet and green. The garden is that appropriated piece of the world into which we can withdraw in seclusion and which we can transform into a personal idyll on the basis of our own dreams and desires. In this way it tells something about who we are and how we view the world. The performance involves a look at the way all the gardens form a landscape and how in the end everyone helps define the world he lives in.

LANGUAGE NO PROBLEM