Alain Platel

A piece of dance theatre conceived and choreographed by Alain Platel for his company Les Ballets C de la B (Les Ballets Contemporains de la Belgique). Platel was in the process of developing the work when he learnt of the death of the German choreographer and dancer Pina Bausch and was so moved that he offered it as a posthumous gift to Pina.

A group of men gathers around some dead horses to perform a ritual. Summarized in one sentence like this, "nicht schlafen" might retain the semblance of a story. But everything instantly contradicts this notion. The area of the archaic cult is bounded by a giant blanket. And amongst the men there is one woman. Is this the staging of a new Rite of Spring? Will a woman be sacrificed once more to atone for failing masculinity?

Why We Fight? is a cinematographic film that tries to understand the violence around us, but also within ourselves, in order to better cope with the world today.

Alain Platel has never shied away from confronting the audiences with an unusual universum. And his latest work, vsprs is his most outrageous yet -- one critic calling it "the weirdest, most shocking and provocative dance performance you will ever see." The dance, made up of ten dancers and ten musicians, is performed to an adaptation by Fabrizio Cassol of Claudio Monteverdi’s ‘Marian Vespers’, one of the most important works in the history of European religious music.

A piece of dance theatre conceived and choreographed by Alain Platel for his company Les Ballets C de la B (Les Ballets Contemporains de la Belgique). Platel was in the process of developing the work when he learnt of the death of the German choreographer and dancer Pina Bausch and was so moved that he offered it as a posthumous gift to Pina.

A group of men gathers around some dead horses to perform a ritual. Summarized in one sentence like this, "nicht schlafen" might retain the semblance of a story. But everything instantly contradicts this notion. The area of the archaic cult is bounded by a giant blanket. And amongst the men there is one woman. Is this the staging of a new Rite of Spring? Will a woman be sacrificed once more to atone for failing masculinity?

Why We Fight? is a cinematographic film that tries to understand the violence around us, but also within ourselves, in order to better cope with the world today.

Why We Fight? is a cinematographic film that tries to understand the violence around us, but also within ourselves, in order to better cope with the world today.

Alain Platel has never shied away from confronting the audiences with an unusual universum. And his latest work, vsprs is his most outrageous yet -- one critic calling it "the weirdest, most shocking and provocative dance performance you will ever see." The dance, made up of ten dancers and ten musicians, is performed to an adaptation by Fabrizio Cassol of Claudio Monteverdi’s ‘Marian Vespers’, one of the most important works in the history of European religious music.