circus music theater
Post uit Hessdalen (PUH) is the company of juggler and video maker Stijn Grupping and director Ine Van Baelen. Together they create hybrid performances centered on juggling with bouncing balls and (live) music. Their circus and musical theatre is lauded internationally for its attention to detail, technical ingenuity and interplay with the rhythm and drums of musician Frederik Meulyzer. Adopting a pared-down performance language, PUH seeks out ways of representing phenomena such as time, space and our virtual future on stage. For example, by literally trying to escape time, or by making the rhythm of the economic rat race tangible using bouncing balls, or by sharing the stage with musical robots.
PUH plays in theatres, schools, jazz clubs, circus festivals, opera houses, squares, forests, car parks, … for young and not so young audiences.
Dear spectator,
each performance is a two-way conversation, with the senses on alert and great curiosity on both sides, but also the questions are tricky, the answers complicated and the outcome changeable. Even if we have not truly found each other, be aware that we have listened attentively and will try again tomorrow. And again.
Yours sincerely,
Post uit Hessdalen
Liv Laveyne on Post uit Hessdalen in Circusmagazine#48 (September 2016):
‘What makes this creative duo so interesting is that it is pursuing substantive research over a longer period than just one production, and links this to various forms and disciplines. From their debut, The Smallest Family Circus in the World, in which they employed video projection to transcend the physical limits of the circus body in time and space, to the documentary Poolnacht, in which the shimmering grey darkness and the voice of a narrator put you into a timeless trance, and now this PAKMAN, radically different in form and discipline, the content shares the same concern: how do we humans deal with the phenomenon of time? As a virtual, natural or economic factor.’
Tuur Devens on Man Strikes Back at Theaterkrant.nl (November 2021)
‘Post from Hessdalen had already proven with PAKMAN to impressively bring together technique, juggling and artistry. With their latest juggling performance, they pull off that tour de force again. It has become a cleverly timed and beautifully dosed composition in image and sound.’
Since 1940, an inexplicable light phenomenon has been observed in the valley of Hessdalen in Norway.
Between December 1981 and the summer of 1984, the number of sightings peaked to between 15 and 20 a week. Since then, a group of scientists has been looking for an explanation of this mysterious spectacle of light. All the hypotheses so far proposed – from car lights to extraterrestrial life – have been dismissed due to insufficient evidence.
Only about a hundred people continue to live in the valley of Hessdalen. The community was once four times as large. Nowadays many of the houses are empty. Having been ridiculed for their attempts to describe the mystery, those who still live in Hessdalen now do so with great discretion.
© PUH