HISTORY ALIBI COLLECTIVE

Pat Van Hemelrijck has been making theatrical productions using objects, stage sets and mechanisms for more than thirty years. In 1977 he was in at the birth of the by now legendary theatre group called RADEIS (together with Josse De Pauw and Dirk Pauwels). A company that used virtually wordless movement and pantomime theatre with objects. Van Hemelrijck not only appeared as a perpetually amazed, somewhat naïve and clumsy actor, but especially as an inventor of remarkable objects and mechanical or electrical ways of bringing them to life. He turns these objects in to co-actors with the other players. When Radeis stopped at the height of its (by then) international fame in 1984, Pat Van Hemelrijck went further along the same path with the solo productions “Terracotta” (1985) and “Tout Suit” (1987). From 1988 to 1990, he worked with the Dutch musical theatre company ORKATER. He established a semi-permanent artists collective, ALIBI, in 1991.

The Alibi Collectief stands for a highly inventive object theatre that consists of the grace of discovered objects, video images, overhead projection, minuscule cameras, installation art, wonderful stories and a fertile imagination.
Characteristic is the mixture of artistic disciplines and the exploration of new areas of art through a search for connections in modern-day forms of visual culture, created to the rhythm of music played on self-made, never-before-seen instruments and emphasised by the actor as the driving force for the materials.
Van Hemelrijck’s work, through its ceaseless flow of imagery, appeals to an audience ranging from the very young to a much steadier, older person.

Alibi Collectief is a multidisciplinary theatre company consisted of artistic soul mates. Some of them are already quite at home at Flavoria: Luc Tegenbos, Al Balis, Frédéric Le Junter, Philippe De Maertelaere, Geert Waegeman, Koen Van Roy, Diony Hoogenboom… these are just a few of the names that often reappear in Alibi productions and installations. And of course we are also always looking out for new Alibi visionaries from the worlds of art, video and film, music and dance, photography, literature and so on.

SEARCHING FOR AN ALIBI?

Why Alibi? An alibi is an excuse for briefly being somewhere else. A short distraction, a moment’s dreaming or simply being elsewhere. Discovering a new world. A world full of strange experiences. But above all, alibi is theatre that moves mountains. Mountains that Pat Van Hemelrijck calls Pièces Montées because – like wedding cakes – they are built up and decorated piece by piece. Anything might happen in and around these mountains. Theatre performances for example, but it might also be an exhibition or an installation, or something might just happen...

 SMAAKMAKERIJ-FLAVORIA

Alibi has already had its own workplace with a small theatre close to Brussels’ North station since June 1993. This is where the productions are made and are first shown to organisers and a limited audience. In late 2005 the name of this workplace was changed from De Smaakmakerij to “FLAVORIA”.