Pléïades, in absentia

With Pléïades, in absentia, Cindy Van Acker engages with the work of avant-garde composer Iannis Xenakis, a free and defiant spirit whose revolutionary energy pervades the entire score. He is known for his mathematical approach to composition, his use of probability and his unconventional scores, written not on traditional staves but on engineering graph paper.

Through these innovative methods, Xenakis seeks to recreate climate phenomena and mass movements, to make the world resonate: we hear clouds, flocks of starlings, the force of a vital impulse.

Created in 1978 for six musicians and forty-eight instruments—including the sixxen, designed specifically for the piece—Pléïades is a unique rhythmic work composed of four modular movements: Keyboards, Metals, Skins and Mixtures.

To navigate this sound material, as powerful as it is complex, Cindy Van Acker continuously reimagines the choreography's relationship to music, bringing together on stage five dancers, six musicians from the Eklekto collective and set and lighting designer Victor Roy. Within this vast space of impossibilities, they bring forth fleeting glimpses of freedom.