2Halves
Premiered on the 8th of February 2011 in Spui Theater, The Hague, during the CaDance Festival 2011.
Choreographers and dancers Manuel Ronda and Kenneth Flak set foot in the deep caverns of their souls. Ronda and Flak became friends at the Theaterschool Amsterdam and shared an interest in the limitations a space can enforce. At that time they made plans to create something together, and a decade later they are finally able to fulfil this wish.
In 2Halves they portray two characters that try and come to terms with themselves, with their torn histories, their incoherent thoughts, and their vulnerability. Nothing is as it seems. They use their shared memories and fantasies as an Ariadne’s thread to find their way in no-man’s-land.
Watch trailer: 2Halves
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The Chinese Room
Premiered on the 16th of September 2010 at the Korzo Theater, The Hague, The Netherlands. Touring Norway March 2011.
What’s the next stage in the evolution of humanity? Will we finally merge with the machines and with each other, creating the New Human, Humanity 2.0, permanently wired into the universal Mind of Mankind, finally dissolved, finally rid of individual existence…
In The Chinese Room Kenneth Flak hurls himself and his collaborators Külli Roosna, Thomas Dotzler, Matsuo Kunihiko and Thomas Falk into an investigation of what it is to be human in a networked reality, searching for links between the technologies of power, the technologies of the mind and the technologies of information. How do these technologies shape the body? How does the body shape these technologies? Where is the mind in all of this? Will we still be human if we merge with the machines? Or are we already machines—free at least from the messy business of the flesh?
Watch trailer: The Chinese Room
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The Fork, by performance collective [minus 20]
Premiered 25th of September 2010 at the AvantArt Festival, Wroclaw, Poland.
The collective consisting of Polish dance theatre makers Harakiri Farmers, Norwegian choreographer/performer Kenneth Flak and French composer/musician/inventor David Chazam explores the banal world of love story in search of what is lurking in the shadow. They strongly believe that if you look at something long enough you can always discover things that you have never seen before. It is like with “Empire Strikes Back” – it takes time to discover that one asteroid is a shoe and the other one a potato. And love’s the same. If you keep looking at it, it starts to look like a potato.
Watch trailer: The Fork
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A Baroque Duet
Premiered 28th of September 2010 at Moderna Dansteatern, Stockholm, Sweden. Touring Sweden October 2010.
A Baroque Duet is playing with the baroque fascination for pompous decoration, abundance, refinement and the joyful tearing apart of the flesh.
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Of Gods and Driftwood (trio)
God Studies #3 (solo)
God Studies #4 (duet)
These two performances, both premiered in 2008, represent two different takes on the Norse mythology.
The Norse gods are magnificent, complex and strong characters with very human flaws and shortcomings: Odin, the god who created the world, but does not understand it; Thor, the god that protects humans and gods, but might as well destroy it all with his uncontrollable rage; and Loke, the joker of the mythology: He frequently causes big problems for the gods, but always manages to solve them again by his cunning and intelligence.
God Studies #3 and Of Gods and Driftwood are Kenneth Flak’s interpretations of this mythological universe, tales of classical superheroes where there is no such thing as absolute good or evil. There are only more or less successful strategies of survival, and, when this is no longer possible: to die in style.
Watch trailer: God Studies #3
Watch trailer: Of Gods and Driftwood