Cultural Compass: Rituals at the opera, women of the printing world and Fire in Brussels
Every Sunday, Belga English picks its favourite events from the cultural agenda. This week: Wagner's Parsifal embraces ritual and experimental staging, women's voices are raised on the page at the Plantin-Moretus Museum and 50 artists come together to play with Fire.
Parsifal, until 22 October, Opera Ballet Vlaanderen
A new production of Wagner’s Parsifal is always a major occasion, but when director Susanne Kennedy takes on this monumental score, the result promises to be something far beyond convention.
Kennedy describes her staging as a “cyber-mystery play,” an immersive theatrical experiment that seeks to be not only seen and heard, but felt in the body. Her aim is a total work of art that overwhelms, absorbs and carries the audience into a shared ritual.
For Kennedy, the ritualistic nature of Parsifal lies at its heart. Rituals, she argues, are where theatre and opera were born, long before religion or psychology framed our understanding of them.
The Parsifal myth itself stretches back further than Christianity, addressing something timeless: how inner transformation leads to awareness, independence and compassion. “I want to delve deeply and go through that process together with others. That’s what opera is about: it’s a ritual we can celebrate together,” Kennedy says.
© OPERA BALLET VLAANDEREN
Her vision also challenges the way we think about opera as drama. Opera singers, she says, are not there to deliver psychological realism. Instead, the emotion is carried in the sound and the space, heightened by music rather than gestures. It is a world of symbolic resonance rather than literal narrative.
Ultimately, Kennedy suggests, Parsifal is everyone’s story. Just as Parsifal must learn to recognise and heal Amfortas’s suffering, so too must each of us confront and tend to the “sick king” within. This, she believes, is a lifelong task – and the true meaning of Wagner’s final masterpiece.
Women’s Business / Business Women, until 11 January, Museum Plantin-Moretus, Antwerp
As the saying goes, “Behind every successful man there is a woman”, and at the Museum Plantin-Moretus, women stood shoulder to shoulder with their husbands. Even more impressive: they often forged their own paths. 300 years of women’s overlooked stories decorate the museum starting at the end of September.
The celebrated printers Christopher Plantin, Jan Moretus and Balthazar Moretus may dominate the history books, but the family business was never solely a man’s world. Daughters corrected proofs, maids supported the household and women rose to become directors who struck trade deals and shaped the company’s future.
The museum’s archives of letters and journals reveal these hidden contributions and restore the women’s voices to their rightful place. The Reading Cabinet will also present works by Antwerp artist Maria Segers, whose watercolours capture life’s fleeting moments with striking simplicity.
Fire, 25 September-1 March, Villa Empain, Brussels
The Boghossian Foundation presents Fire, an exhibition gathering some 50 modern and contemporary artists around the elemental theme of fire. Since humanity’s earliest beginnings, fire has fascinated and terrified every culture, present in myths, rituals and festivities.
Across sculpture, painting, installation, photography, video and tapestry, the works explore fire in its many forms: the fleeting spark, the steady candle flame, the hearth’s warmth, the devastation of wildfire and more. Each piece reflects on the symbolic, physical and sensory force of this universal element.
The duality fire presents is what the artists explore. Fire, which is both an element of creation and destruction, provides comfort when controlled and wreaks havoc when wild.
Belga recently interviewed Michiko Van de Velde, one of the contributing artists for Fire, who will unveil her largest piece to date in honour of the show.
Ongoing events
Brussels
Bruxelles, la Congolaise
Loisirs-Plezier: Brussels 1920-1940
John Baldessari: Parables, Fables and Other Tall Tales
MAURICE, Tristesse et rigolade
Ghent
Beauty as Resistance
Fairground Wonders
Stephan Vanfleteren: Transcripts of a Sea
Hasselt
Rococo Reboot
Leuven
Ecstasy & Orewoet
Grace Schwindt: A History of Touch
Kortrijk
Rekindling
(MOH)
#FlandersNewsService | The Museum Plantin-Moretus © PHOTO SIGRID SPINNOX
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