BENJAMIN
ABEL
MEIRHAEGHE

UPCOMING: CONCERTS ISABELLE LEWIS + GIVE UP,OLD GHOSTS! + MANTIKE BLOOM BOOM

UPCOMING: CONCERTS ISABELLE LEWIS + GIVE UP,OLD GHOSTS! + MANTIKE BLOOM BOOM

UPCOMING: CONCERTS ISABELLE LEWIS + GIVE UP,OLD GHOSTS! + MANTIKE BLOOM BOOM

UPCOMING: CONCERTS ISABELLE LEWIS + GIVE UP,OLD GHOSTS! + MANTIKE BLOOM BOOM

UPCOMING: CONCERTS ISABELLE LEWIS + GIVE UP,OLD GHOSTS! + MANTIKE BLOOM BOOM

UPCOMING: CONCERTS ISABELLE LEWIS + GIVE UP,OLD GHOSTS! + MANTIKE BLOOM BOOM

UPCOMING: CONCERTS ISABELLE LEWIS + GIVE UP,OLD GHOSTS! + MANTIKE BLOOM BOOM

UPCOMING: CONCERTS ISABELLE LEWIS + GIVE UP,OLD GHOSTS! + MANTIKE BLOOM BOOM

UPCOMING: CONCERTS ISABELLE LEWIS + GIVE UP,OLD GHOSTS! + MANTIKE BLOOM BOOM

UPCOMING: CONCERTS ISABELLE LEWIS + GIVE UP,OLD GHOSTS! + MANTIKE BLOOM BOOM

UPCOMING: CONCERTS ISABELLE LEWIS + GIVE UP,OLD GHOSTS! + MANTIKE BLOOM BOOM

UPCOMING: CONCERTS ISABELLE LEWIS + GIVE UP,OLD GHOSTS! + MANTIKE BLOOM BOOM

The Ballet

©
Emiel, i'll always love you ofcourse.
The iconic graduation piece ‘The Ballet’ was only once performed in 2018 in a fully packed Vooruit. Take Oscar Wilde and Alfred "Bosie" Douglas. Or Vaslav Nijinsky and Sergei Diaghilev. Legendary but tragic romances from art history appeal to the imagination. The same goes for performer Benjamin Abel Meirhaeghe and dancer Emiel Vandenberghe. On Wednesday 30 May 2028 they performed 'The Ballet': their version of those famous love sagas. With live piano music by pianist Maya Dhondt and Elisabeth Klinck, meter-high collected painted backdrops from famous ballets, Benjamin Abel Meirhaeghe shows the machinery and structures behind the theatre. His graduation project 'The Ballet' was a dark, melancholic and tragic ode to grandeur, cast in the structure of a ballet performance, in which song and dance are the leitmotif through 18th-century romanticism. The performance was the start of Meirhaeghe's career on the big stage, a goodbye, a separation of two real genuine loved ones with excsesive images, Meirhaeghe tattooed the name of Emiel live on his body. The Ballet was an explosion of all elements we can still see in Meirhaeghe’s work today, the constant tension between classical repertoire and a bright future. The special relation with Emiel will stay an important theme in the music and performances of Benjamin.

My dear Emiel, you are more to me than anybody (has any idea). You are the atmosphere through which I see this life. The incarnation of all lovely things. I think of you day and night, and in this night there are a lot of days and a lot of nights, that’s why every minute (every minute!) we spent together has saved my life. It's been saved in my memory and I’ll never forget a single moment of it. I fell in Love, I fell in Love for the way I love you. I fell in Love for and with your Beauty. Beauty is the wonder of wonders. A wonder is build on reality. You always tell me that you love me more than anybody, but what reality is, there is not any other boy in your life that stays like a dog. And If I left. You cry. You left the other boys for me, and only me. We have the power about each other. I’m alive and so are you! I’m alive and so are you! I can love you not only, not only, I can love you not only in my poems. Not only in this fucking letter. Let's don’t spill time, spill spurm and sweat with me. Spill love. Please Emiel,  bring me your pain and your self-forfilled love. Show me the lie. Bring me, so I bring you. So I bring you. Show me the lie. Live the lie with me. Live the lie with me in the life we both don’t want to live. Oscar wrote once that the true mystery of the world is the beauty you can see (and touch and handle).The beauty that you can destroy, and do destroy. My dear love, we will lay on the floor now, pretending dead and morbid, I will hear your tragical voice saying one more last time : “i love you” and then I will hear the blood flowing very slowly out of our veins. It's a goodbye song. I’m alive and so are you! I’m alive and so are you! 

performance

EMIEL VANDENBERGHE

BENJAMIN ABEL MEIRHAEGHE

music

MAYA DHONDT

ELISABETH KLINCK

lightdesign

BART VAN MERODE

thanks to

VOORUIT

OPERA BALLET FLANDERS

DE MUNT

CAMPO

TONEELACADMIE MAASTRICHT

PETER MISSOTTE

DE BLAUWE PEER

MANY MORE