Shelly Shonk Fiffit

In his new performance 'Shelly Shonk Fiffit', theatre and opera director Benjamin Abel Meirhaeghe taps into a theme as incomprehensible as its title: the cosmic.
As always, Meirhaeghe does not start from a text or a defined concept, but everything starts from certain fascinations and the dynamic group of performers he brings together.

On the 25th of December 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope was launched. This infrared telescope is the largest and most sophisticated space telescope ever, allowing us to look far and deep into the universe as well as the past. Among other things, Webb will search for the "cosmic dawn": the light of the very first stars that formed shortly after the birth of the universe.

The infinity of the universe swallows us whole, science is searching but our imagination is absolute. Even more than by the discovery of this telescope, Benjamin Abel Meirhaeghe is fascinated by the ability through which man's thoughts can rise above themselves and the universe. By his ability to invent. In this performance, Meirhaeghe links the high-tech of a telescope to the primitiveness of crafts and techniques.

Travel companion on this trip beyond the limits of our bodies and time is Italian composer Caterina Barbieri. Barbieri makes electronic music, with "transformative and mind-expanding" potential. On the hypnotic Fantas (from the magisterial 2019 album Ecstatic Computation ), the performers, singers and dancers surrender to the inexplicable and unspeakable.

Shelly Shonk Fiffit  becomes an intense and ecstatic visual and musical trip, through our inner world and the reaches of the cosmos. Fiffit!