What is your history as a theatre maker? At the invitation of the Belgian city theatre NTGent, Miet Warlop formulates an answer as only she can. In the long running series Histoire(s) du Théâtre she is the fourth director to accept the challenge of a creation in which present, past and future meet each other in an inspiring way – after Milo Rau, Faustin Linyekula and Angélica Liddell.

ONE SONG - Histoire(s) du Théâtre IV is set in the unique universe of Warlop. A group of performers enters the arena for a mesmerizing ritual about farewell, life and death, hope and resurrection. Together they go through extremes: through sung text, images and objects, oxygen and sweat, they evoke our ‘condition humaine’. Again and again, someone stands up to push their boundaries. They defy time and give expression to a deep human need: the moment when we can transcend our thinking body. In ONE SONG, a co-production of NTGent and Miet Warlop / Irene Wool vzw, a history resonates that has both artistic and personal significance for Miet Warlop. Her reflection on theatre as an art form leads to a physical concept in which we recognize elements from previous productions. The ritual concert with a choreographic pattern was the basis for Ghost Writer and the Broken Hand Break (2018). The invitation to breathe together to exorcise our fears and demons, is as we saw it in Fruits of Labor (2016), using the performance as ‘a painkiller for the world’. It typifies Warlop’s artistic signature that such themes and motifs sometimes resurface years later: in her oeuvre, everything is connected, implicitly or explicitly. It is circular, like life itself, in many ways. The physical effort as metaphor is another element of the research that Warlop started in Sportband / Afgetrainde Klanken (2005), made at the time as a requiem and tribute to her deceased brother Jasper. Through the metaphor of a live competition/concert, including a commentator and a cheerleader, Miet Warlop invites us in ONE SONG to form a community and lift each other up, as in a celebration. The temporary thus becomes the universal, and the personal becomes something of the collective. That is the subtext of ONE SONG: how one song can give meaning to a whole society. Unity in diversity

Miet Warlop (°1978) is a Belgian visual artist born in Torhout. Lives and works between Ghent, Brussels and Berlin. Warlop has a master degree in Visual Arts, she graduated at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent where she studied three dimensional art. Between 2006 and 2007 she was one of the six artists of DE BANK in arts center CAMPO Ghent, where Warlop was working on her series of “Propositions”, called “Grote Hoop/Berg [Big Heap/Mountain]”. While touring with the “Propositions”, she created a new work titled “Springville”, a moving game of chaos, expectation and surprise in which scenography, costumes, props and characters are closely interwoven. As an associated artist of Beursschouwburg Brussels, Warlop kicked off with the second Alligator project, a weekend of mixed media and performances by different artists and musicians. Miet Warlop has been first presented at HAU Hebbel am Ufer in 2012 for the re-opening under the artistic direction of Annemie Vanackere. Her works have been presented on the Baltic Triennale of International Art-Vilnius, at Lisson Gallery London, at the BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels, at KIOSK Gallery, Ghent and at the Blue Project Foundation, Barcelona. She was part of the Berliner Theatertreffen in the frame of “Stückemarkt” in 2014. In the same year Warlop started her own legal production structure “Irene Wool