(incl. festival opening) | introduction to the blind at 6.15 pm | registration for wheelchair users and audio description when purchasing tickets via the festival box office: telephone 0341-217 16 48, email tickets@euro-scene.de.

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.”

www.mietwarlop.com

+ Before the performance: opening of the 33rd edition of euro-scene Leipzig with short greetings at Schauspiel Leipzig / Foyer 1
+ After the performance: reception of the Vertretung von Flandern in Deutschland im Schauspiel Leipzig / Parkettfoyer und Foyer