Side Step 2020 | Michiel Vandevelde: Andrade

In his essay Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibalist Manifesto, 1928) the Brazilian poet and polemicist Oswald de Andrade meditates on cannibalism as a form of metamorphosis. The external intruder – in the Brazilian context the Western conqueror – is not necessarily repelled but swallowed, digested and expelled in another form. Starting from this notion, choreographer Michiel Vandevelde regards the public sphere of mass culture in our society a conqueror, an intruder created by the Western individual that takes over the role of the consumer instead of being the object of consumption.

Andrade is part of Vandevelde’s series of works that investigates popular culture, each based on an individual “motion phrase” appropriated from a dance number in a music video. In the fourth part of the series, a duet of body and light, dancer Bryana Fritz stretches this material as far as possible temporally while choreographer Vandevelde controls the lights within the performance space. Andrade is an expression of a cannibalised dance that wells up from inside the body and crystallises the key questions of the series: who is eating, and who becomes eaten?

Michiel Vandevelde is a Belgian choreographer, curator and author who has studied dance in P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels. He creates works for public spaces and theatres in collaboration with performers of different ages and backgrounds. He has explored social phenomena such as mass culture in works including the tetralogy Love Songs (veldeke) (2013), Antithesis, The Future of the Image (2015), Our Times (2016) and Andrade (2017).

www.michielvandevelde.be