The Wave

What do we inherit from the dance heritage of the Flemish Wave, and how do we pass it on?

In The Wave, choreographer Zoë Demoustier explores the living memory of a movement that reached its peak in her birth year, 1995. Not through archival reconstruction from video materials, but through the body as an archive: the bodies of dancers, choreographers, and even audiences who carry its traces. How does a new generation of dancers feel about this repertoire, its techniques, ideas, and images, how does it translate to a body of today? What do we carry within us? What do we want to change?

On stage, dancers from different generations meet: older dancers from the Flemish Wave, classically trained dancers of Opera Ballet Vlaanderen, adolescents, children, and performers with disabilities. Together they embody the fragile, playful transmission of dance across time like a whispered message that slowly changes as it travels from body to body.

Drawing from the work of Alain Platel, Wim Vandekeybus, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Jan Fabre, Marc Vanrunxt, and others beyond the canon, Demoustier creates a performance that is both homage and reinvention: not a consecration of the past, but an opening towards the future.