Cultural Compass: Fairytales at the opera, gender in art and immersive sounds in the museum

Every Sunday, Belga English picks its favourite events from the cultural agenda. This week: Belgium’s biggest opera companies each offer an evening of whimsy versus reality, gender stereotypes shift through the lens of art and the KMSKA collaborates with sound architecture.

L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, 20 November, La Monnaie, Brussels

For one night only, La Monnaie celebrates the enchanting world of L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, Maurice Ravel and Colette’s operatic gem. The work’s origins are almost as whimsical as its plot. During the First World War, Opéra de Paris director Jacques Rouché approached the celebrated writer Colette to create the text for a fairy ballet. She chose Ravel to compose the music, but the first script sent to him in 1916 vanished in the post while he was still serving in the war. Only in 1917 did he receive a new copy, after which he hesitated, famously writing back, “I would like to compose this, but I have no daughter.”

The project eventually evolved into an operetta retaining its choreographic spirit, prompting Colette to expand her text into a full libretto. Nearly a decade later, in 1925, the fantastical tale finally came to life in Monte Carlo. The opera centres on a mischievous child whose own toys, furniture and creatures rise up to confront him, turning his room into an imaginative battleground of magic, mischief and moral awakening.

This performance also marks a milestone for the MM Academy, which for ten years has offered young musicians from Belgium’s eight conservatories the chance to gain professional experience with La Monnaie’s orchestra and choirs. To honour the anniversary, the MM Soloists and MM Laureates will perform Ravel’s evocative score, accompanied by live illustrations from celebrated artist Reinhard Kleist, a three-time winner of the Max and Moritz Prize. It promises to be an evening where music, storytelling and art converge in spellbinding harmony.

L'uomo dal fiore in bocca & La Voix humaine, 22 November, De Singel, Antwerp

Just a few days later, Opera Ballet Vlaanderen offers another rare, one-night-only encounter, this time in Antwerp’s celebrated arts centre, De Singel. The company presents a poignant double bill that bridges worlds, moods, and eras: Luc Brewaeys’ L’uomo dal fiore in bocca paired with Francis Poulenc’s La Voix humaine. The evening also marks ten years since the death of Luc Brewaeys, widely regarded as one of Belgium’s most significant contemporary composers. Together, the two works form a haunting meditation on connection, isolation and the fragile intensity of everyday life.

In L’uomo dal fiore in bocca is set in a modest café near a train station, tables scattered across a terrace, a quiet customer lingering after missing his train. A man approaches him: “l’uomo dal fiore in bocca,” the man with a flower in his mouth. That “flower” is a malignant tumour, and he knows he has little time left. What follows is a strange, arresting exchange. The customer, a father on his way home after doing the shopping, recounts the small, mundane details of his day. The dying man listens with the desperate attentiveness of someone who sees life slipping from his grasp. He clings to existence “like a plant climbing the bars of a fence,” savouring memories of juicy apricots and asking the customer to count the blades of grass in a tuft. “The number of blades of grass you count is the number of days I have left to live.”

If Brewaeys’ opera exposes the stark edge between life and death, Poulenc’s La Voix humaine turns inward, capturing the private heartbreak of a woman losing her lover over the telephone. Written in 1959 to Jean Cocteau’s 1930 text, the work feels strikingly modern. The halting conversation, punctuated by silences, dropped connections and misunderstandings, echoes today’s emotional turmoil: the message that never arrives, the unanswered call, the pain of ghosting. With no set and no distractions, the focus narrows to a single voice, a single woman, and the full weight of her unraveling emotions.

Art X Gender, until 19 April, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels

How can art help us unravel deeply rooted gender stereotypes? The virile, brutal man or the gentle, maternal woman confined to domestic spaces? The temptress, sinner even guilty figure are the enduring images that have shaped collective imagination for centuries and are still visible in the art world.

Through its new display, Art x Gender, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium examines how artworks reinforce or challenge these representations. Nearly 30 pieces, spanning the 16th to the 20th century, are presented in the heart of the Old Masters Museum. ​
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The exploration does not stop within a single gallery. A guided trail throughout the permanent collection invites visitors to continue questioning gendered representations, while a new participatory programme engages school groups aged 15–20 in critical reflection on societal norms.

By combining scientific insight with a critical lens, this exhibition forms part of a broader mission: to deconstruct stereotypes and foster an institution more anchored in society, attentive to the narratives it conveys. These artworks demonstrate how museums can move beyond preservation, using art as a tool to challenge assumptions and inspire dialogue about the roles, identities and images.

Le Scarabée d’Or, 20 November, KMSKA, Antwerp

Renaissance woman Mireille Capelle, an architect of sound, theatre and visual art will present her contemporary creation Le Scarabée d’Or among the artworks of the KMSKA. This piece which falls under her concept of architectures sonores, functions like a sound installation: “crystallised snapshots of a continuous artistic process”. It invites visitors not to watch or listen in the traditional sense, but to inhabit a space shaped by vibration, resonance and time.

In an architecture sonore, sound becomes a way of entering another reality. Environmental noises, the hum of place, the resonance of objects and the timbres of classical instruments intertwine to form a living installation. Nothing is artificially manufactured; everything is drawn from natural sources that surround us constantly, often unnoticed. As Capelle puts it: “I believe that there is music in all architecture. I believe that geometric shapes sing. That’s why I also believe that flowers, trees, animals, everything around us has a certain resonance that our human ears don’t recognise, or no longer recognise.”

Instead of following a traditional composition, this experience relies on shifting sonic textures. It is less a performance than an immersion.

Scarabée d’Or continues this exploration in a collaboration between HERMESensemble, KMSKA, Mireille Capelle, Aïda Gabriels, Astrid Vansteenkiste, Milan Henderickx and Maarten Buyl. Visitors encounter an environment shaped by sound, light and visual design, with speakers placed throughout the museum space.

Scarabée d’Or proposes a simple protocol: sit, listen, look. It does not interpret the surrounding art or turn it into music, it instead, it shifts the tempo of perception. Running in a continuous loop with no climax or conclusion, the work invites observation to play with time itself.

​(MOH)

_{#FlandersNewsService | KMSKA © BELGA PHOTO JONAS ROOSENS}

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