The facade of an apartment block magically opens up like a tin of sardines. In the twilight, the touching beauty of our everyday existence unfolds. With Living Apartment Together, Yves Degryse presents his first creation as co-artistic director of NTGent. With this production, Degryse and his company BERLIN are striking out in a new direction: a fictional world, constructed with cinematic precision and brought to life in a high-tech scenography.
Living Apartment Together is a layered portrait of city life, built up as a mosaic of stories within a single block of flats. The performance takes place on and in front of the side wall of that building. As night falls, the audience gathers on a lawn in front of the building, on seating elements designed specially for the performance. A video projection transforms the seemingly banal facade into a living tableau. Wearing headphones, spectators are immersed in five apartments and a stairwell, where scenes unfold that are at once banal and very moving.
Together with Angelo Tijssens (co-screenwriter of the acclaimed films Girl and Close by Lukas Dhondt), Degryse wrote a mosaic narrative about living together, saying goodbye and the quiet beauty of the seemingly banal. For the performance, he calls on a first-rate cast (see below). Each character from the film is portrayed live by a local extra - without words, with simple actions.
The performance opens the wall of the apartment building and takes the audience into the lives of 13 characters and one dog. From an older couple preparing to sell their flat to a young couple madly in love facing a turbulent chapter. On the fifth floor, a lonely child admires microscopic worlds, while her single mother tries to carry the world on her shoulders. A man waits for a loved one who nevers call back, and four deliverers walk - and cycle - their legs off to maintain their 4.7 rating on the app.
Sometimes lives touch quite literally - via pipes, a fire alarm, a staircase. Sometimes they do so in more subtle ways: a view through binoculars, a song heard through walls, a pizza left at the wrong door.
Living Apartment Together is at once intimate and grand. The creative process took place in NTGent Minnemeers, where a different apartment was recreated and filmed every week. The meticulous editing and technically challenging projection make this creation a sensory performance that nestles somewhere between cinema and theatre.
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