GOLDEN CHILD
The project 'Golden Child' by the Belgian artist-curator Barbara Raes is a new ritual that transforms a child’s experience of loss into a collective work of care.
MAKERS
Beyond the Spoken / Barbara Raes
SYNOPSIS
🌞 'GOLDEN CHILD' IS A PERFORMANCE RITUAL THAT SUPPORTS CHILDREN WHO HAVE EXPERIENCED A TRAUMATIC LOSS. In a cycle of ten sunrises, every night a child - oblivious about what will happen - spends the night on board of a fishing boat. The boat trip is part of a twelve hours long ritual. Just before dawn, the child is woken up by an actress (the Sun Princess) and musician, and invited to sing a song for the sun to rise again on the horizon.
🌞 Golden Child challenges some of the most essential conventions of the performing arts in order to create a modern ritual that transforms unacknowledged feelings of individual grief into a communal experience of vulnerability and care.
🌞 Every night the ritual is performed, the focus is on a single child. Nevertheless, Golden Child can involve multiple layers of spectators (or witnesses). In recruiting and preparing the participating children, Raes collaborates closely with social organizations and support groups for mourning children, and with the primary caregivers of the participant. Caregivers, as well as other members of the child's social world, are invited to welcome back the child after its boat trip and watch the sunrise together. Members of the general public can be invited for this moment too.
🌞 Golden Child was first performed as the central event of the major ten-day theatre festival Theater Aan Zee in the Belgian coastal city of Ostend curated in 2018 by Belgian artist-curator Barbara Raes. The performance ritual was also performed in 2021 in Ghent (BE) and in 2023 in Amsterdam (NL). Each time, the performance is re-created from scratch and adapted meticulously to its new location and surroundings.
🌞 Golden Child is ideal for the framework of a festival, where the audience is invited in the early morning to wave at the child to show that there is always support, even in the darkest times.
🌞 'GOLDEN CHILD' IS NOW READY TO CROSS BORDERS. In 2026, 2027, 2028 and 2029, Raes would like to develop the ritual in regions around the world that need healing but have a different mourning culture, such as India, Brazil, Eastern-Europe, Mexico, Greece and the Middle-East.
In 2030, Raes will bring together all the children that ever participated in the ritual since 2018. By then, there will be more than hundred, all of them young adults. In co-creation with the participants, Raes will create a new ritual they can share back home and turn into a shared language.
In 2031, Raes will create 'Golden Child' for the last time, for children that cannot see the sun.
"A healing project that seamlessly blends care and art"De Morgen (BE)
INTERVIEW
In 2018, Barbara Raes gave an extended interview to leading Belgian newspaper De Standaard about 'Golden Child' and Beyond the Spoken, her workshop for unacknowledged loss.
VIDEO
BIOGRAPHY
The Flemish performing arts curator Barbara Raes, currently one of the artistic leaders of the leading Belgian city theatre NTGent, decided to reorient her professional career and practice in the arts in 2014. She went to the UK to train as funeral celebrant, where she observed and analyzed more than eighty funerals, using her experience in the performing arts to better understand the dramaturgy of these rituals.
When Raes returned to Belgium, she obtained a research position at KASK arts college in Ghent and developed the project Open End (2015-2018), in which architecture and healthcare students worked together to design ‘new mental and physical spaces for farewell rituals’. To complement this more theoretical research, Raes founded the organization Beyond the Spoken, a workspace for unacknowledged loss.
Raes has curated a series of projects and festivals that explore how art and rituals can address the topic of grief and care. They include the 2019 amen & beyond program for the Arts Centre Vooruit in Ghent, the research block unfolding fields of interaction with health, life, loss and death for DASarts in Amsterdam (2016), and U-Loss for HAU Berlin (2018 and 2020), Kaaitheater Brussels (2019), Dublin Theater Festival (2021) and deSingel Antwerp (2022). Raes also curated the festival Theater Aan Zee in 2018 for which she designed the performance ritual Golden Child.
"The idea that we have to solve our problems on our own has become very dominant. We don't even consider to form a community around our grief"Barbara Raes
CONTACT
❔ Are you interested in programming this performance? Please contact Sophie Vanden Broeck, performance sales manager at NTGent:
✉: sophie.vanden.broeck@ntgent.be
☎: +32 485 80 38 43