The Way You Sound Tonight

>>English Description

Hypnotizing dance on electronic music as a trance-like experience

With The Way You Sound Tonight, Arno Schuitemaker creates an 'acoustic ballroom’. Five performers and their pulsating movements take the audience—sitting on two sides of the stage—into a reality that is radically carried through. There seems to be no beginning and no end.

On the impressive electronic music of Rotterdam-based composer/guitarist Aart Strootman, who plays live, the performers keep going non-stop, bringing one-hour cycles into being that could last for an eternity: distance and proximity, night and day, breath and heartbeat. In each cycle, the composition of the performers varies, so the audience group that firstly joins this hypnotizing continuum has a slightly different encounter than the group that is part of the next hour.

Boundless in energy, The Way You Sound Tonight streams and steams. It is an intensifying and trance-like experience that transcends, and then lastingly resounds.

The Way You Sound Tonight premiered at the prestigious Holland Festival 2018. Cultuurpers called it “one of the highlights”.

Ongoing performance
The Way You Sound Tonight is composed of multiple cycles of an hour each that (potentially) could be repeated for an eternity. The performers keep going non-stop. At Theater Rotterdam, two audience groups can join this hypnotizing continuum. At 20:15 the first cycle starts and at 21:15 the second cycle starts. For a full-on experience joining both cycles is recommendable.

PRESSQUOTES

“Best performance of the season” – Lisa Reinheimer, Theatermaker

“Arno Schuitemaker surpasses himself with an exquisite The Way You Sound Tonight. (…) Schuitemaker succeeded extraordinarily well to replacet the mere visual-esthetic body that dominated the Dutch dance landscape for decades with a sensible, physically resonating effort of the dancers.” – Fransien van der Putt, Cultuurpers

“The cycle as a frame for the radically implemented flow of continuous movement is a central theme. The performance ends like it begins: one dancer in de the dusk, movement being contained. (…) Also with the lighting the cyclical has been brilliantly fulfilled.” – Alexander Hiskemuller, Trouw

“… I realized that, as audience, you are part of the performance. It is awesome that Arno Schuitemaker gives us the opportunity to experience this.” – Emilia Nova, 8WEEKLY
 

About Arno Schuitemaker
There is a buzz about Arno Schuitemaker. And not without reason. With great acclaim his performances travel accross Europe. The magazines tanz and Dance Europe even named him "the most leading contemporary choreographer in The Netherlands”. The Way You Sound Tonight is his first big stage production and premiered at the prestegieus Holland Festival in 2018.

“Like a power surge, that is what Arno Schuitemaker’s performance feels like. Hypnotizing movements and electronic minimal music. This is about energy, it creates tension, and it makes you hold your breath.” (VPRO)