Arno Schuitemaker

Work

The Way You Sound Tonight

The performance received the award for the most impressive dance production in The Netherlands in 2019: “The Way You Sound Tonight is one of those theater experiences you wish could last forever. Schuitemaker succeeds in getting everything perfectly right.”

Loss is a force that shapes the present. Whether it is the separation of once-solid connections, the disappearance of a shared identity, or the quiet erasure (or denial) of histories, it exists in the spaces between what was and what remains, lingering in the body, in memory, and in the rhythm of daily life. Yet there is strength in carrying loss together, and in entrusting one another with what remains.

Five dancers move in a continuous flow. No pauses, no breaks. This principle, already present in Arno Schuitemaker’s work, is pushed further here by the recurring cycle: one body borrows the breath of another. Unlike classical tragedy, where insight is gained through suffering, the performance reveals experience through the transformative repetition of movement, in which loss is not endured alone but worked through together, one movement after another, metabolized into ever-renewing energy.

The Way You Sound Tonight becomes an act of memorizing. Not only in the way its movements etch themselves into the body, looped again and again, but also in how the title reflects a desire to hold onto someone, to preserve them. Which is to say, to keep them alive, in motion. As Olga Tokarczuk writes in Flights: “Standing there on the embankment, staring into the current, I realized that - in spite of all the risks involved - a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest; that change will always be a nobler thing than permanence; that that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn to ash, while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity.”

The Way You Sound Tonight premiered at the Holland Festival in 2018. It was “one of the highlights of the festival,” according to Cultuurpers.

Find more reactions in the press, the performance dates, and the credits by scrolling down.

Photo: Piero Tauro

Photo: Piero Tauro

Photo: Sanne Peper

Photo: Sanne Peper

Photo: Sanne Peper

Calendar

Press

"Best performance of the season." - Theatermaker

“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 the dusk, his movement small and intimate. (…) Also the lighting brilliantly fulfills the cyclical nature.” - Alexander Hiskemuller, Trouw

“Arno Schuitemaker surpasses himself with an exquisite The Way You Sound Tonight. (…) Schuitemaker succeeded extraordinarily well to replace 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

Credits

Concept and creation: Arno Schuitemaker
Performers: Ivan Ugrin, Piet Defrancq, Kim Amankwaa, Emilia Saavedra, Stein Fluijt / Mark Christoph Klee / Gaetano Badalamenti
Dramaturgie: Guy Cools
Music composition: Aart Strootman
Lighting design: Jean Kalman
Scenography: Arno Schuitemaker and Jean Kalman

The Way You Sound Tonight is a production by SHARP/ArnoSchuitemaker in coproduction with Holland Festival, Chaillot - Théâtre national de la Danse, DansBrabant and Le Pacifique CDCN Grenoble ARA in collaboration with CCN2 Centre chorégraphique national de Grenoble. With support of ICK Amsterdam and thanks to Het Huis Utrecht. The Way You Sound Tonight is created with contributions by Performing Arts Fund NL, Fonds 21 and NORMA Fonds. SHARP/ArnoSchuitemaker receives multi-year funding by AFK (Amsterdam Fund for the Arts).