FOR MATA WITH LOVE

A new creation by Pé Vermeersch / Radical HeArts

AT THE TROUBLEYN LABORATORIUM, ANTWERP

LANGUAGE: Multiple Languages Spoken | Dutch Surtitles
TICKETS: €20,00 
 

For Mata with Love

A poetic dance theatre performance conceived and choreographed by Pé Vermeersch, created for and with Angela Babuin, and inspired by the legacy of Mata Hari.

Performed by Vermeersch and Babuin, this duet unfolds through dance, song, spoken text, music, and visual imagery, exploring the fragile interplay of beauty, sensuality, freedom, and survival.

Rather than recounting Mata Hari's biography, the performance takes her life as the starting point for its own artistic inquiry. Drawing on defining moments of her life, particularly her celebrated performances and tragic execution, the work reimagines Mata Hari as a founding mother of performance art: among the first artists to place the body itself at the centre of artistic expression, communicating through presence rather than virtuosity and transforming the performing body into both medium and message. It is this understanding of performance that continues to inspire Vermeersch's distinctive choreographic language, rooted in improvisation, embodied presence, and a sensitivity to space.

Angela Babuin embodies Mata Hari, dancing on two narrow raised beams where balance and instability become a metaphor for the precarious path between freedom and persecution. Alongside her, Pé Vermeersch moves through the space as a searching spirit, singing, dancing, and observing, embodying both Mata Hari's lingering presence and Sister Léonide, the nun who accompanied her in her final hours. Their distinct choreographic journeys remain connected, converging in moments of shared presence. Inspired by Japanese Noh theatre and Indian Kathakali, Vermeersch's choreographic language weaves ritual, memory, and transformation into a poetic dialogue between Eastern and Western performance traditions.

For Mata with Love reflects on the enduring tension between freedom and social control, asking what is truly condemned when a woman refuses to conform. It is an ode to those who choose beauty over fear, movement over silence, and artistic freedom over conformity. It celebrates the body as a place of memory, transformation, and resistance, affirming that while a life may be extinguished, the dance continues.

About Pé Vermeersch & Radical HeArts

Since 1993, Belgian choreographer, performer, philosopher, and visual artist Pé Vermeersch has developed a singular artistic language at the crossroads of dance, voice, text, and visual art. Throughout her career, she has explored themes of sensuality, perception, embodiment, and the poetic potential of the human body.

Drawing inspiration from sources as diverse as the Kamasutra, Oscar Wilde, Marguerite Duras, Yasunari Kawabata, and Sophocles, Vermeersch has developed a form of dance theatre that combines philosophical depth with physical immediacy. Her extensive study of traditional theatre forms in India and Japan, together with years of working alongside butoh pioneers Min Tanaka and Akira Kasai, has profoundly shaped her artistic vision.

A decisive turning point came with Blondes Have No Soul, an internationally touring solo work performed in silence, within a white space, and often in complete nudity. Free from narrative and theatrical ornament, the work revealed a radically personal dance language centred on perception, vulnerability, and the complexity of embodied experience. It also opened the doors to museums and visual arts institutions, where Vermeersch's choreography entered into dialogue with drawing, installation, and performance art.

Through her company Radical HeArts, she has continued to create uncompromising works such as It Organs the Body, a danced concert for organ music in churches; Making the Skies Move, performed to the music of Olivier Messiaen; and Encounters, a three-month danced exhibition developed with art historian Paul Vandenbroeck.

Across these projects, dancers are invited to cultivate surrender, refined sensibility, and extraordinary attention to detail. Today, Vermeersch's practice encompasses dance, drawing, installation, video, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Her work consistently challenges performers to inhabit radical situations in which imagination, precision, and sensory awareness become the true sources of movement.