PROJECT

In Matisklo Bosse Provoost and six other theatre makers search for the limits of what can be expressed in words and images on the basis of poems by Paul Celan, with costumes that swallow a person up and heaps of animated material.

As a survivor of the Holocaust, Celan goes to moral and linguistic extremes. His poetry reaches for that which is ‘beyond’ language: a world long before or long past mankind, speaking from beyond his own death… Every word is like a stone that can be picked up and examined from multiple directions. Three performers take a shot at it.

Several ambiguous and inward-looking ‘inclemencies’ also come into play. What extensions of meaning and imagination arise when these inclemencies converge with Celan’s poems?

Doesn’t the dark of the sky testify to distant starlight that can never reach this world? Matisklo is an invitation to gaze at ‘black stars’.

THREADSUNS
above the grayblack wastes

A tree-
high thought

grasps the light-tone: there are
still songs to sing beyond
mankind.

(P. Celan, Breathturn)