Biography
Kabinet K and Ballets C de la B, two dance companies from Ghent, decided to join forces in 2022 under the new name laGeste: a home both for the intergenerational practice that Joke Laureyns and Kwint Manshoven developed at Kabinet K, and for the legacy of choreographer Alain Platel, who was the cornerstone of Ballets C de la B for more than 35 years.
Each project is a world of possibilities, populated with a diversity of bodies. Bodies carry a history that can weigh them down, leave indelible marks or permeate them to the core. But a body is not a prison, a scar or a life sentence. The body also holds the promise of transformation. The body is a battlefield on which the great social battles are fought.
Cisgenders versus fluids, the enterprising versus the unproductive, the excellent versus the limited, the identitarians versus those who think they can become anything and anyone, the privileged versus the decolonised, the old scarred by historical traumas versus the young threatened by ecological disasters, the haves versus the have-nots.
This polarisation has increased enormously in the past five years and intensified in times of pandemics and other crises. With our work, we hope to create temporary spaces where we can bridge the gap between people again. We are building an inclusive narrative, not on the margins, but right at the heart of what we do. We aim for diversity and mixability at all levels. We would like to see more reality in the represented bodies and at the same time fight for the possibility of transformation, play and poetry, of singing our way out of the boxes in which we have shut ourselves.