Ode to a Love Lost

Benjamin Abel Meirhaeghe has created a furore as a director and countertenor in his own operatic musical projects (A Revue, Madrigals). He challenges the classical repertoire in his work, asking dancers to become singers and singers to become dancers. Meirhaeghe calls for unashamed access to big emotions, while offering pleasure to the semi-skilled, looking for a different kind of virtuosity. In his first production as a resident Toneelhuis artist, he himself performs as a dancer.

Ode to a Love Lost takes place deep in the crater of a heart. Its starting point Meirhaeghe’s own personal love story. Back in 2018, he made the production The Ballet together with his then lover and muse. That mythologized relationship still inspires Meirhaeghe. Like the love stories between Diaghilev and Nijinsky, Wilde and Bosie, Warhol and Basquiat and all the passionate but unrequited loves that did not withstand the aesthetic struggle.

As a dancer on stage himself, Meirhaeghe engages in an intimate artistic dialogue with a number of young choreographers. The focus is on his own body, influenced by Western standards and ideals of beauty that can be seen in art and advertising, among other places. With a lost love as motor, a deep crater as landscape and a dual relation to the norm, Meirhaeghe literally moves toward liberation. 

He is accompanied live by Berlin-based singer/songwriter Finn Ronsdorf on soul and blues piano and joined by performers Jelle Haen and Désirée Cériocien.