Barbara Claes - KAOS/Albe

This summer, KAOS and Albe vzw are again organising a residency on the Albe site in Kapellen. After the open call in the spring, Barbara Claes was selected.

She works as a writer, theatre maker, performer. As a member of the occasional collective Lucinda Ra, she regularly works in contexts outside theatre, such as a psychiatry, a school or (emergency) village. She creates performances around themes such as the family drama, euthanasia, but also the biographical, such as her marriage in India or makes a work about her deceased sister and its impact on family and childhood. Language is the form in which she shapes her stories: a vocabulary empire on the cutting edge of poetry, debauchedness, literalness, childishness, grotesqueness, unfinishedness, in which the child is often given a major role. She prefers to write alone on a poem or a theatre piece, but in addition she looks for how to do so with others, and what role language then takes on, especially in an environment that is not obvious. She likes to evoke playfulness and the boundary between non-fiction and fantasy. Not everything is stage, but everything can become theatrical. In Albe, together with the inhabitants, she wants to create a catalogue of all the sounds there. And process that catalogue into a primal soundscape to lay somewhere in nature.