How do you make it ... Piet Van Dycke

Piet Van Dycke (Tienen, 1996) works as a dance and circus maker, performer, coach, and teacher at various art organizations. He has been active for several years at dOFt, Circumstances, fABULEUS, Cie Woest, TeaTime Company, and LAP. He graduated in 2018 as a choreographer from the Fontys School of the Arts in Tilburg. He won the Jacques de Leeuw prize in 208, was chosen as 'most promising creator' by critics Wendy Lubberding and Annette Embrechts in both 2019 and 2020, and won the BNG Bank Dance Prize 2021.

How do you create it?

I always start from a theme or metaphor that I translate into a scenography with physical possibilities. For ‘BEYOND’, I wanted to show how that which separates us – a border – can transform into a bridge. After that, there was a period of experimenting with the scenography and movement research. I film everything, piece together the footage in the evenings into sequences, and edit them into scenes. It’s one big editing process of choosing, cutting, and pasting.

Why do you create it?

I want to connect radically with my work. ‘BEYOND’ is about trust, collaboration, and the risks of dependency. What happens when you share control? I look for moments where something is truly at stake, where honesty and vulnerability coincide. In circus, you can’t fake anything: the risks are too great, the focus too intense. If one person lets go, everyone falls. That purity, that collective awareness, is why I love circus.

With whom do you create it?

For ‘BEYOND’, I work with six professional artists from different disciplines. For dramaturgy, I collaborate with Marie Peeters; for costume design, with Oona Mampuys; for lighting design, with Raf Wouters; for music composition, with Bastian Benjamin; and for scenography, with Arjan Kruidhof and Arjen Schoneveld, two engineer-scenographers. Together, we explored how collaboration takes shape in the physical constructions of the performance.