In Chaos – making sense of an ending, biologist and actor Thomas Ryckewaert tries to make sense of the events from recent years: the untimely passing of his father, the lockdown, ecological disasters and a growing defeatism. With the help of mathematics, ecology, science fiction, diary entries and Playstation games, Thomas faces his demons. In Chaos, the boundaries between the intimate and the global, between our interior and exterior world, between reality and madness, are disappearing. Can scientific models offer solace on a confusing and unpredictable planet? Can you simultaneously grieve for a loved one and for the end of the world? Is there poetry in theory? And what about theater?

In 2016 AlphaGo, a deep neural network developed by Google’s Deepmind, challenges the world champion of Go, Lee Sedol. Go is the oldest board game in the world and despite its simple appearance, the number of possible board positions in a Go game exceeds the amount of atoms in the universe. It is won by the presumed exclusively human skills of intuition and creativity, so no one expects a computer to be able to beat a human player. But the implausible happens: AlphaGo beats Sedol 4 – 1 and hits the front page of Nature.

AlphaGo’s 37^th move in the second game is crucial and hits like a bomb. The computer comes up with a solution no human being could have imagined, Sedol leaves his chair and returns pale as a ghost. The live commentators fall silent and the image seems to freeze. In this moment of defeat and wonder the radical weirdness of AI stares us in the face: highly intelligent, creative but also completely alien.

In ‘Move 37’, Thomas Ryckewaert takes this moment as the starting point for a lecture performance about phenomena that are beyond human imagination. With cosmologist Thomas Hertog he presents an unusual lecture performance on the radically weird. They join on a trip through the dark, cool horror of the intelligent machine, the beauty of fading conventions on what is human at all, through time and space warped in black holes. In this lecture performance nothing is what it seems, human becomes alien, the computer intuitive, perception is deceived and the robot dreams.

‘Not just your average lecture performance, but more like a David Lynch – in which inexplicable things create a permanent friction between the normal and the radically weird. Fascinating.’ – Etcetera

A cruel and confusing place, where the banished man finds refuge. Where he is confronted with forces that are beyond his understanding. At times it rains fire and brimstone, at times only drops of water, but weeks at a time, until everything has been engulfed. There is nothing as confusing, however, as the forces he discovers in himself: jealousy, desire, bloodlust. But the most ungraspable feeling of all is love.

In his latest production, Thomas Ryckewaert takes on one of the most paradoxical masterpieces of world literature: Genesis, the first book of the Bible. A play about our lifelong attempt to control the chaos.

This production is the third part of a triptych in which this poetic and shocking work is explored from several perspectives. Genesis (I) – Science introduces the audience to the knowledge of philosophers, theologians and Bible translators. Genesis (II) – Religion is a celebration of the Eucharist directed by Ryckewaert. Church- and theatre-goers are the joint witnesses of a 2000-year-old ritual that has been subtly amended in a composition made up of light, sound, song, text and silence. In Genesis (III) – Theater, Ryckewaert stages his version of the Book of Genesis. In search of a contemporary ritual.

In Genesis (I, II, III) Ryckewaert successively directs the scientist, the priest and the actor. A quest for the source of theatre, for the essence of ritual. Is liturgy theatre? Is theatre liturgy?

In fact I believe nothing,
And I doubt everything, even You.
But sometimes, when I feel You really do exist,
Then I feel that You are Love, and that You are lonely,
And that, sharing my despair, You seek me
Just as I seek You.
Gerard Reve

She’s at home. Alone. Outside the world is raging. Inside everything is quiet. She thinks she’s unobserved. At this place, at this hour, during her daily routine, her wildest fantasies, most intense desires, deepest fears grow. Time is ticking.
Portrait; the breathless midpoint of an unknown story. A desolate portrait. A deceptive still life.

PART I: SCIENCE.

Six scientists are invited to give a lecture in the theater. Each of them reveals the influence of Darwin on their specific field. A concluding debate is held with all scientists on November 24, 2009: the 150th birthday of the publication of On the Origin of Species.

PART II: INSTALLATION.

The sound recordings of the scientific lectures is combined with the scenographic research for part III: Theater. Opening: November 24, 2009. Monty, Antwerp.

PART III: THEATER. Homo sapiens.

There have been places on earth, not so long ago, where the definition of ‘man’ has been questioned. Altered, maybe.

Few fractures in human history were more severe than those caused by Nazism in het first part of the 20^th century. It is far from evident to assess the Röntgen photos of this fracture. The perpetrator stays silent, the surviving victim is engulfed by trauma and the outsider has no right to speak.

Some survivors, however, had the incredible talent and nerves to observe their fracture from a distance and put it in words. People who, in other times, would have written great works of literature on all sorts of topics. Faith condemned them to that one subject that would never let them go.

In his directional debut, Ryckewaert takes the works of Primo Levi, Jean Améry and Jorge Semprun and sculpts them into theater.

Nightmares of depraved sleepers. (..) A dream of a nightmare, you could call it. It’s hard to say afterwards what you have seen. But one thing is sure: it grabs you by your throat. – De Standaard