KINTSUGI/I WILL, LOVE Comes to Theater Basel
Performances run through 22 June.
By: Stephi Wild Jun. 12, 2025
With ‹Kintsugi / I Will, Love›, Ballett Basel invites you to an evening of two world premieres by choreographers Adolphe Binder and Jonathan E. Fredrickson. These works explore the in between spaces – the subtle blur between reality and illusion where a world of encounters, characters, movements and fragments pull at the boundaries of passion and reason.
‹Kintsugi› – Love, illusion, and the beauty found in the cracks.
Inspired by the Japanese art of repairing pottery with gold, the work explores this process as metaphor, in search of the subtle and intangible. Adolphe Binder’s surrealistic choreography and installation for ten dancers stages impermanence and apparent imperfection, embracing the fragments that define us. What becomes of us—what becomes of love—when no one is there to reflect it? ‹Kintsugi› embarks on a journey through landscapes of perception, tracing the delicate line between reality and illusion.
«There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.» Leonard Cohen
‹I Will, Love› by Jonathan E. Fredrickson explores ways of loving. The work follows eight characters navigating their relationships – to self and other. Through kinship and vulnerability, tenderness and resilience, ‹I Will, Love› traces how love manifests, where it originates and is rooted in us. Revealed is a search for connection in and beyond interpersonal relations, of swimming against the current in an effort to preserve something of oneself. To rediscover a place where we sense that we are not alone.
«I am on the way to knowing love.» bell hooks
‹Kintsugi/I Will, Love› is the final premiere at Ballett Basel under the artistic direction of Adolphe Binder. Through the overarching title of ‹Ballett Basel – Anders› (Ballett Basel – Different) Binder has boldly curated two seasons expanding the boundaries of dance and choreography and focusing on new ways of storytelling and perspectives on dance. For the 2024/2025 season, the focus is on the many facets of love and connection, power and powerlessness, lust and friendship, love in all its iteration: romantic and platonic and beyond.
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