ONE DAY I WILL MAKE THE ONION CRY

MAKERS

Beyond the Spoken / Barbara Raes & Victoria Deluxe

SYNOPSIS

"By 2030, depression will be public disease number one, according to the World Health Organisation. With a huge increase among young people. This is not the fault of individuals, it's a collective responsibility. Certainly the arts have their role to play. They have to create space for imagination as a remedy."
--- Barbara Raes on Klara, 1 October 2024

One Day I Will Make the Onion Cry  is an installation and one-on-one ritual by and with Barbara Raes, artistic director at NTGent. In her practice Beyond the Spoken, Raes has been creating bespoke rituals for years. Hidden forms of loss are given a place. Now, for the first time, Raes integrates her private practice into a theatrical context.

One Day I Will Make the Onion Cry  gives space and form to the grief that accompanies solastalgia, the loss of something not yet lost. The grief is already present although the real goodbye has yet to come.

Together with visual artist Manu Siebens, Raes transformed several spaces in De Expeditie in Ghent in October 2024 into a poetic landscape in which the connection became tangible between the overproduction of onions, tears for what will change, and interpreting our tears.

A place where you could embrace grief for what will one day disappear. During the day the rituals took place, in collaboration with musicians such as An Pierlé, in the evenings the installation was open to the wider public, together with a context programme around solastalgia.

One Day I Will Make the Onion Cry  is a creation in the framework of YouTurn, a project by BERLIN, house artist at NTGent. Raes and Siebens gave the onion machine from BERLINs performance Land's End (2011) a fantastic new life.

CREDITS

artistic direction, concept and execution of ritual: Barbara Raes

artistic support: Agnes De Maeseneir, Sophie Bodiang

concept installation: Barbara Raes, Manu Siebens, Victoria Deluxe

design of installation: Manu Siebens

execution installation: Manu Siebens, Mit Van de Vyver, set studio NTGent, Victoria Deluxe

costume design: Jo De Visscher, costume atelier NTGent

thanks to: Evelyn Everaerts-Donaldson, Nele Buyst, Yves Degryse

 A UNIQUE EXPERIENCE

During One Day I Will Make the Onion Cry, Barbara Raes takes as much as an hour and a half for each participant. Each visitor thus gets an intense and personal experience. As evidenced by this reaction of a participant (Ghent, October 2024):

‘I have just left the premiere of One Day I Will Make the Onion Cry, a ritual performance which along an invisible portal reaches straight into your chest and squeezes your heart there very lovingly, very carefully, very devotedly, very gently but without hesitation.’

"The sun was shining. Coughs of ginger were still burning in my lungs after I choked so much in my tea this morning that I spat it all out all over myself. I'm out of tears, I thought. What if I cried too much? All that wasted moisture that didn't end up in ‘The Onion's’ tear archive! But Barbara knows her way around the maze of the soul. I talked about the street I grew up in. How one half of the street is forest, which was sold in plots this year. Soon each plot will be cut bare. Beech, birch, pine, oak, rowan, hazel, a plane tree ... Jays and owls. I cried."

"Soon, at my new home site here in the business park behind our park, a piece of wild land will be taken. Mostly willows, buckthorn ... a few years ago a nightingale sat there. As I write this, I am still looking out at the crests. It is hopeless. To move forward, doors to sadness sometimes have to close. But today we caught a tear together for the archive: ‘A forest of tears’. For every tear, there is a cloth of love."

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.

At NTGent, Raes brought in the artistic line Art, Care & Rituals. With One Day I Will Make the Onion Cry, she brings her private practice to the theatre for the first time.

CONTACT

❔ Are you interested in programming this performance? Please contact Floria Lomme, performance sales employee at NTGent:
✉: floria.lomme@ntgent.be
☎: +32 472 66 66 79