Kunstenfestivaldesarts 010 - a look back over a hugely successful festival!
The fifteenth Kunstenfestivaldesarts ended on Saturday 29 May 2010 with four full houses. The welcome reserved for Saturday evening's productions by the Argentine Mariano Pensotti, the Brazilian Lia Rodrigues, the Japanese Toshiki Okada and Frenchman Xavier Le Roy was exceptionally warm: they literally won over festival-goers. During the three weeks of the festival, nearly 21,000 tickets were sold which means close to 1,000 people followed and supported the festival every evening!
The Kunstenfestivaldesarts' audiences are keen followers of contemporary, inspiring and atypical artistic offerings. More than ever this year, the range of artistic creations in our international programme - both from more established artists and still fairly unknown talents - awakened people's curiosity and generated debate.
Encouraging the creation of new work
A large number of new works saw the light at this year's festival, for the most part initiated and co-produced by the Kunstenfestivaldesarts, and many of them held wonderful surprises in store for their audiences. Highlights include the premiere of the new work by Germany's Christoph Schlingensief, which proved a revelation for many, as well as the provocative new project from the Hungarian Kornél Mundruczó. There were also excellent creations from Belgian artists this year, such as Inne Goris, Etienne Guilloteau, Sarah Vanagt and Claude Schmitz: projects that have often allowed them to assert their artistic language and introduce it to a wider audience.
This 010 festival was also an opportunity for opening up reflection on the city and the people who live there, through artistic projects by Lotte van den Berg, Sarah Vanagt and ZimmerFrei for example, but also in a series of initiatives such as workshops, debates and a travelling theatre for children (the Kamishibai project) which have taken the festival to people who do not normally access the city's cultural offerings.
Promoting encounters
Besides audiences from Brussels and Belgium as a whole, we noted again this year the huge presence of foreign professionals attracted by the festival's programme, as well as the excellent coverage we received in the international press, in particular two glowing reviews in Le Monde.
We would like to thank everyone who contributed to making the Kunstenfestivaldesarts 010 such a success: the artists who have produced such striking work, the theatres and other partner institutions who helped us present these productions in the city, and the audiences who came in their thousands again this year to experience this special event. The Kunstenfestivaldesarts is a space for sharing, with collaboration between Brussels organisations, large and small, French and Dutch-speaking; it is a vital space for encounter and speaking many different languages ; it is a space of dialogue where the culture of the "other" is not a threat or an obstacle, but a field of investigation generating mutual knowledge and respect.
Christophe Slagmuylder and the team of the Kunstenfestivaldesarts