Skip to Content

The Arts Intel Report

A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler
A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler

Puur, by Wim Vandekeybus

June 28 – July 7, 2024
Frankrijklei 1 2000 Antwerpen

The Flemish choreographer Wim Vandekeybus has built up such a strong and large body of work since he made a splash in the 1980s that one of his masterful hybrids of high-octane dance, disjunctive theater, and kinetic video is probably playing somewhere in Central Europe on any given week of the year. Still, the Flanders Opera Ballet’s reprise of the 2005 epic Puur (Pure) seems uncommonly well timed. Puur delivers us to “a dark universe,” states the advance press, in which “a fear of losing power” incites “extreme violence against the innocent.” Vandekeybus had in mind not only Herod’s campaign against newborns but also contemporary genocides, which at this moment are hard not to think of. Better to reflect on them through theater. —Apollinaire Scherr

Purr is on at Opera Ghent from March 23 to March 30; at Opera Antwerp, it runs from June 28 to July 7