From 26 June to 5 July 2014, The Festival Belluard Bollwerk International will welcome several artists from around the world to exchange their artistic ideas with the public. The artist and project research for next year’s edition was, in a certain way, guided by a statement of the Congolese choreographer DeLaVallet Bidiefono: ”Death is in Brazzaville in the heart of the quotidian”.
Being able to tell your “own” story is a basic element of democracy. Through stories we can be recognised, identified and accepted. Listening to stories should become an integral component of our society, in bringing us closer together.
One visionary storyteller, and a central guest of the 31st edition, will be the Lebanese author, actor, director, essayist and visual artist Rabih Mroué. Together with his collaborator and wife Lina Saneh he continually questions theatre practice and goes in search of ways to make it accurate for a contemporary public and society. In his work he uses different forms and formats to give shape to new ways of bringing a narrative to the stage. Theatre, performance and video installations are his tools for questioning (Lebanese) social realities and politics. He isn’t scared of taking a freethinking, daring and risky position towards these subjects.
Belluard Festival will show several works by and with Rabih Mroué on the first weekend: The piece Riding on a Cloud as Swiss premiere, an exhibition in collaboration with the art space Fri Art, a performance-lecture and the movie The Ugly One by Eric Beaudelaire that premiered at the Film Festival Locarno this year.
Cis Bierinckx
General & Artistic Director