Currently Kris Defoort is working on Brodsky Concerts, a piece based on the writings by Joseph Brodsky in which he will be on stage with the actor Dirk Roofthooft. Together they create an homage to Brodsky ’s poetry.

What happens if you feel like the espresso at the bottom of your cup is the only black spot on the horizon?

According to the Russian Nobel prize winner Joseph Brodsky, a poem is a conversation between the writer and the reader, who share two solitudes with one another. In The Brodsky Concerts, actor Dirk Roofthooft communicates the essence of Brodsky’s poetry to the audience. Kris Defoort’s music reveals that which is impossible to say with words. Together they create an homage toBrodsky ’s poetry, to its melody and rhyme, and to the great metaphysical themes that his poetry invokes: the meaning of life, and of death, with or without loved ones, you move through time and space, at one with something or nothing, being between someone or no one.

Première La Bâtie-Festival de Genève, September 2010

During The Brodsky Concerts, Dirk Roofthooft and Kris Defoort aim to create a feeling that Brodsky described as the sensation of the eye that beholds beauty, a telescopic sensation such as that you get in your fingertips when you touch your beloved. Or such as the feeling of supreme happiness that overwhelmed Brodsky when he caught the smell of frozen seaweed.

Joseph Brodsky would read his poems in a sing-song fashion, with the timbre and exaltation of a Russian Orthodox priest. And even if you could not understand a word of it, you would still sense the meaning of the poem primarily by the way the sound came across. The poet is dependent on the language that is revealed in his/her own poetry. At the outset, a poet does not know how the poem will end. Likewise, Dirk Roofthooft and Kris Defoort allow the language to suggest its own sound to them. In doing so, they too are surprised by the result of the improvisation; a result which has surpassed their own expectations.

Both performers, Defoort and Roofthooft, started out together in the opera House of the Sleeping Beauties (LOD / Toneelhuis / De Munt), composed by Kris Defoort and directed by Guy Cassiers. Dirk Roofthooft played the lead role, Eguchi. The two seasoned artists guarantee a first-rate performance in The Brodsky Concerts. The element of surprise will undoubtedly emanate from what these two talented improvisers, together with us, discover for themselves on the stage.

Credits

Based on the Nobel Price winning work of Joseph Brodsky

Text: Joseph Brodsky
Music: Kris Defoort
Concept text, video, play: Dirk Roofthooft

Production: LOD
Coproduction: Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg, deSingel (Antwerpen) en Centre de Recherche et de Formation Musicale de Wallonie