Mystica is a visual and sensory performance inspired by female mystics. In an enchanting ritual, choral singing and hair-hanging merge, inviting the audience to pause, listen, and experience what arises when light and darkness meet.
In this multidisciplinary creation by MOVEDBYMATTER and Muziektheater Transparant, circus and music theatre intertwine. To pulsating basslines, hair-hangers and choral singers construct a spiritual microcosm in which everything is interconnected. Mystica unfolds as a ritual in which eight mystic women, who lived between the eighth and sixteenth centuries, are given a voice once more. What do the words of these female spirits awaken in us today? As suspended bodies and polyphonic voices encounter one another, a search emerges for a shared breath – a community relearning to speak in a common language.
The surviving texts of Hildegard von Bingen, Mirabai, Teresa of Ávila, Sun Bu’er and others were rewritten into modern poetry by Elisa Demarré and woven into a contemporary polyphony by Timo Tembuyser. The basslines were composed by Jens Bouttery. Under the direction of Kasper Vandenberghe, Mystica explores the lost mystical undercurrent of the here and now – not as an escape, but as a powerful visual performance that places togetherness at its core.
“The nature of God is like an ocean – infinite and deep. The deeper we dive, the more we see its beauty and greatness.”
– Hildegard of Bingen, 12th-century mystic
