Next Day

13 small individuals, all to a certain degree dancer, artist and musician, form a bizarre community. Are they abandoned? Are they lost? Today they’re innocent & carefree, but who will they become in the society we’re preparing them for? And what if we would consider them – as they proposed themselves to Philippe Quesne during the rehearsals – as trainee-superhero’s, gathered in an institute to save the world?

Paris-based director Philippe Quesne compares his work to a series of entomological studies in which we might watch human beings evolving, as if under a microscope. In Next Day, as in his previous plays as l'Effet de Serge, La Mélancolie des Dragons, Big Bang & Swamp Club, Quesne will again take us to a human microcosm with uncertain boundaries, mixing dream and reality, music and languages, loneliness and the group. Only this time with thirteen kids on stage.

The theatre of Philippe Quesne is grafted on common rituals of contemporary life, altering these on stage into small ceremonies, both derisory and playful, but extremely symptomatic of the shortcomings of our society. The stage is a laboratory, a "vivarium space", where extreme situations of the ordinary take place. Philippe Quesne’s work has the capacity to catapult us into another world, developing simple actions using everyday objects, used in ways that are clearly outside their - and our comfort zone.

In response to the request of arts centre CAMPO (Ghent, Belgium) to create a more visual and performative answer the series of theatrical works with children, Philippe Quesne creates Next Day, a piece with 13 kids between 8 & 11 years old. Remember the 90’s with Moeder & Kind, Bernadetje & Allemaal Indiaan by Alain Platel & Arne Sierens and the more recent trilogy üBUNG by Josse De Pauw, That Night Follows Day by Tim Etchells & Before Your Very Eyes by Gob Squad.