02.10.25, 19:21, GAME Interventions, Night of the Imagination

Amidst tropical greens and glass corridors. GAME live and on the loose.

From greenhouse to lecture hall, from tropical sweat to velvet hush: the students of GAME (Ghent Advanced Master Ensemble, KASK & Conservatorium Gent, with Ictus and SPECTRA) set GUM and its glasshouses adrift. Their interventions - solo, collective, visual, performative - hover between installation and performance, between presence and disorientation. Sometimes you stumble upon them, sometimes you only hear them behind a wall, sometimes you are too late.

GAME is both ensemble and laboratory. New artistic terrain is explored through co-creation and curation: experiment, dialogue, and the blurring of boundaries between music, performance, and transmedia creation. A shifting constellation of makers redefining the lines between performer, creator, and audience.

Nothing is fixed, everything is in motion. 

• Quartet for One

A hallucinating ensemble. Four in one.

In Quartet for One (Garth Knox), Joseph Chan performs an entire string quartet on their own: from cello to first violin, four voices compressed into one viola. A hallucination of ensemble, where reality and illusion seep through each other.

Performer: Joseph Chan

• Rondo de Facto

Percussion on stone: a ritual carved in rock.

Mazyar Kashian wrote this piece in 2020 for a single object: a stone. In six minutes, Liese-Lotte Bekaert conjures an unexpected sound-world from it: from brittle and granular to massive and resonant. A miniature that rolls like a sonic pebble through the night.

Performer: Liese-Lotte Bekaert

• Sor’aqua

Voice as liquid body, ritual and resistance.

In Sor’aqua, Sarah Grace Graves explores the voice as an element that purifies and pollutes, flows and coagulates. The programme includes Embrace (Sarah Grace Graves), Mouthpiece II (Erin Gee) and et pretiosa et casta [FLOCS] (Gaia Aloisi, 2023). A 23-minute score of trills and whispers where the voice is not a medium but matter itself: a temporary space to disappear into.

Performer: Sarah Grace Graves

• In the Memory of the Goldfish

Silent ponds, trembling grounds.

In the Victoria greenhouse, Edoardo Parente unfolds an audiovisual installation of water, light, and electronic resonance. What first falls silent is continually disturbed by interventions from Rodrigo Evangelista, Liese-Lotte Bekaert, and Sarah Grace Graves.

Performer: Edoardo Parente

• Where are we going? And what are we doing?

A plant conference à la John Cage.

John Cage’s 1961 lecture is reimagined by Rodrigo Evangelista as a polyphonic experiment. No linear story, but a chaotic ecosystem of voices and silences.

Performer: Rodrigo Evangelista

• To the Earth

Percussion and voice as an ode to Gaia.

Frederic Rzewski’s To the Earth (1985) is a pseudo-Homeric hymn to Gaia, goddess of the earth. Written for voice and simple objects, here reinvented in a botanical form. Rodrigo Evangelista and Liese-Lotte Bekaert alternate languages: first English, then West Flemish. A double ritual where earth and fragility speak through different sound-worlds.

Performers: Liese-Lotte Bekaert & Rodrigo Evangelista

• Birrrrds Sound

Sound in flight.

In the subtropical greenhouse, a collective improvisation unfolds: violin, percussion, shakers and flute echo birdsongs that never sound the same twice. The audience moves through the plants like birds in a vast aviary.

Performers: Siyi Xia, Hui Chi Li, Joseph Chan, Anna Svetlakova & Derek Lee

• Jungle Series

A musical jungle of colour and chaos.

Inspired by Rousseau’s paintings, Anna Svetlakova and Derek Lee create a layered musical jungle: flute solos (Northern Lights by Melissa Keeling, Afina’s Flute by Dmitri Remezov) and saxophone (Rondes de printemps by Bruno Mantovani). A 30-minute sound ecosystem grown over by subtropical green.

Performers: Anna Svetlakova & Derek Lee

• Border Loss

Percussion as a vanishing landscape.

In Border Loss (Sarah Hennies), Hui Chi Li explores how boundaries dissolve and blur. Subtle transformations reveal shifting terrains and unfamiliar routes. A 20-minute journey through silence, noise, and the slow churn of change.

Performer: Hui Chi Li

• Re:IAx

An acoustic sauna, generated by humans and AI.

Soothing sine waves, wind chimes and AI voices fill the greenhouse. The audience adds “acoustic steam”, creating a constantly shifting soundscape. Re:IAx invites both relaxation and critical reflection: a wellness experience for an age where AI is here to stay.

Performers: Joris Blanckaert, Liese-Lotte Bekaert & audience

• Pas de Cinq

Movement in a pentagon.

Five performers follow strict patterns in a five-sided space. Mauricio Kagel’s 1965 work turns walking into ritual, resistance into sound. The audience is drawn into the choreography, becoming part of the sonic game.

Performers: Liese-Lotte Bekaert, Rodrigo Evangelista, Hui Chi Li, Edoardo Parente & Julen Latorre

• 1+1=1

Two winds, one breath

In 1+1=1 by Pierluigi Billone, two bass clarinets fuse into a single organism. Not dialogue but merging: breath doubled, tension thickened. One body of sound, breathing on the edge of ecstasy and stillness.

Performers: Iñaki Marcos & Julen Latorre

• Echo Chamber

Visible singing, inaudible voice.

Inside a glass room, Fateme Khezri sings, but her real voice never reaches us. Echo Chamber embodies Iranian censorship that erases women’s voices. What does presence mean when your voice is forbidden?

Concept & composition: Ali Choopaninejad

Performers: Fateme Khezri & Ali Choopaninejad

• Ciel Étoilé

Starlight from silence

In this fragile work by Kaija Saariaho (1999), every sound and silence becomes a star. Percussion and double bass search the microscopic for a cosmic view: a hushed gaze into the infinite.

Performers: Zoe Markle & Nolan Ehlers

• The Endless Shift

Labour as choreography, cycling as sound.

Three musician-cyclists forge rhythm from breath, bell and pedal stroke. Repetition becomes trance, endurance a composition. A 30-minute condensation of a work that lets exertion sing endlessly.

Concept & composition: Ali Choopaninejad

Performers: Ali Choopaninejad, Isa Opstaele & Derek Lee

• Forum Bleed

A staircase of leaking sounds.

What resounds elsewhere acquires a new body here. Just as a butterfly may cause a storm, music conjures an echo to life in another space. And thus Billone’s 1+1 becomes 2 after all.

Performer: Joris Blanckaert