ONE SONG

Bleachers, a field, a team. Fan scarfs with symbolic slogans and a violinist on a balance beam. A male cheerleader, dressed completely in white, and in red a female referee with a megaphone. A singer on the treadmill is accompanied by the percussionist who appears everywhere. Add flags and a song that increasingly raises the mood: In ONE SONG, the Belgian Miet Warlop dares to try the balancing act between sport, competition and a rock concert. The fifteen performers progress into a kind of trance, all the way to complete exhaustion. Just like in a community of belief, they join through a song that creates meaning by embodying the spirit of their community. And it poses a question to us: Are we strong enough to escape the shadow of our past? The performers run and sing, chant, make music and jump around – faster and faster, increasingly impassioned – as though they were in an introspection of our current public rituals. They try to suffocate pain and worry in a spectacle that they use to intoxicate themselves. In the end, they put their hands on their hearts and sing a hymn, as though they were comforting themselves in the face of an apocalypse: “Grief is like a block in your head. It’s hard. It’s rough.”

In ONE SONG, Warlop invents a ritual about farewells, life and death, hope and resurrection, about her intimate battle against the trauma of a family tragedy. She thus succeeds in creating a relevant and, despite all loudness, highly sensitive view onto today’s conditio humana. Truly powerful!