Peeping Tom
Auditorio de Tenerife programmes two performances of the Belgian dance company Peeping Tom, which comes to the island with the show Triptych: The missing door, The lost room and The hidden floor.
Several characters are wandering around an ocean liner. They set off in search of an ideal, they left full of hope, but now they are lost in this mysterious and macabre labyrinth. The characters live between reality and the imagined, guided by natural forces that lead them to an uncertain destiny. Gabriela Carrizo and Franck Chartier, directors of Peeping Tom, create an unsettling, dark and closed world, typical of the company's work, while placing a unique and extreme language of movement and performance at the centre of the pieces.
Each part of the trilogy has its own setting and evokes a film set. The Missing Door is set in a room or corridor full of doors that do not open. The action of The Missing Room takes place in a cabin on the ship, focusing on the inner world of the characters. The hidden floor takes place on the public stage of the ship's abandoned restaurant, where natural forces have taken over. The scenic changes between the piece take place in full view and become part of the performance, as if it were a live film montage.
Triptych is a reworked version of three short pieces that Peeping Tom created for the Nederlands Dans Theater. Gabriela Carrizo directed the first part, The Missing Door, while Franck Chartier directed the two installments that followed, The Lost Room and The Hidden Floor. Carrizo and Chartier wanted to bring these pieces into the Peeping Tom repertory to be able to continue performing them. Together, the choreographers reimagined the pieces for the dancers of their company. In that sense, Triptych shows how different bodies, idioms, and working methods can not only overlap, but also mutually nourish one another.
Yet another layer is to be found in the new team of performers that Peeping Tom selected especially for the characters of Triptych. Carrizo and Chartier focused on the new group’s distinctive combination of technical qualities, which straddle both dance and theater. With their own physical vocabulary, the new dancers will trace new lines of memory, not only across Triptych, but across the company as well.
Concept and direction: Gabriela Carrizo and Franck Chartier
Performance: Konan Dayot, Fons Dhossche, Lauren Langlois, Panos Malactos/Akira Yoshida, Alejandro Moya, Fanny Sage, Eliana Stragapede, Wan-Lun Yu
Artistic assistance: Thomas Michaux
Sound dramaturgy: Raphaëlle Latini
Sound composition and arrangements: Raphaëlle Latini, Ismaël Colombani, Annalena Fröhlich, Louis-Clément Da Costa, Eurudike De Beul.
Light design: Tom Visser
Set design: Gabriela Carrizo, Justine Bougerol
Costume design: Seoljin Kim, Yichun Liu, Louis-Clément Da Costa
Confection costumes: Sara van Meer, Lulu Tikovsky, Wu Bingyan (intern)
Technical coordination: Giuliana Rienzi, Pjotr Eijckenboom (creation)
Technical engineers: Bram Geldhof, Ilias Johri (lights), Tim Thielemans/Jonas Castelijns/Jo Heijens (sound).
Stage management: Thomas Dobruszkes (stage manager), Clement Michaux, Kato Stevens (stage assistants).
Production interns: Lisa Gunstone, Robin Appels
Tour manager: Alina Benach Barceló
Production manager: Helena Casas
Communication manager: Sébastien Parizel
Production and Administration: Rhuwe Verrept
Company manager: Veerle Mans
Based upon Adrift, created with the dancers of NDT I: Chloe Albaret, Lydia Bustinduy, César Faria Fernandes, Fernando Hernando Magadan/Spencer Dickhaus, Anna Hermann, Anne Jung, Marne Van Opstal, Roger van der Poel, Meng-keWu, Ema Yuasa/Rena Narumi, with artistic assistance by Louis-Clément Da Costa, Seoljin Kim and Yi-Chun Liu.
Production: Peeping Tom
Co-production: Opéra National de Paris, Opéra de Lille, Tanz Köln, Göteborg Dance and Theatre Festival, Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles, deSingel Antwerp, GREC Festival de Barcelona, Festival Aperto / Fondazione I Teatri (Reggio Emilia), Torinodanza Festival / Teatro Stabile di Torino – Teatro Nazionale (Turin), Dampfzentrale Bern, Oriente Occidente Dance Festival (Rovereto).
With the support of: the Flemish authorities
Distribution: Frans Brood Productions
Triptych: The missing door, The lost room and The hidden floor was created with the support of the Tax Shelter of the Belgian Federal Government.
As the lights comes on the audience is plunged into a man’s mind: his life is passing before him like a film—or maybe it is the film of lives other than his, some past, others still to come. And so, in the cabins and hallways of an ocean liner, begins the labyrinthine voyage that is Triptych. In this trilogy, time, memory, and premonition revolve around the illusions, utopias, and lost loves of blinded characters who act out their own fiction. Uncontrollable forces set them adrift at each stage of their search.
In Triptych, the characters, lost in time and space, are continually drifting away and searching for one another. When they embarked on this voyage in pursuit of an ideal they were full of hope, but reality led them towards an uncertain destiny. They try to find a path through the wanderings of their thoughts while reviving and reliving their memories—or creating new versions of them, open to distortions. Triptych thus reveals a melancholy nostalgia for the future.
The characters’ inner quest is reflected in the scenography. They are isolated, lost in the encompassing darkness of the stage, in a labyrinth of missing doors, lost rooms, and hidden floors. The scenography was conceived as three successive film sets. A triple huis-clos in which the characters try in vain to create a new version of their illusory reality.
This filmic aspect manifests itself likewise in the show’s soundscape, which is dotted throughout with Foley effects: a falling glass, a door slamming, a beating heart, a metronome, the creaking and grinding noises of the ship. They act as so many anchor points while the characters are sucked in and ejected, while time vibrates, stagnates, fragments, and manifests itself differently for each of the figures onstage.
Gabriela Carrizo and Franck Chartier experimented with changing the filmic sets from one scene to the next in order to get the transitions to unfold as an autonomous dramaturgical force. Hence the man at the end of the second set, who remains alone on the large bed while the technicians work around him to mount the third. His chagrin expands exponentially, and literally becomes a puddle of tears, a theatrical “Lacrimosa.” In Triptych, this intermediary dramaturgy is an intimate part of the maze-like wanderings into the past and the future.
In the third and final set of Triptych, the old man’s mourning man takes on mythic proportions: his puddle of tears becomes the ocean in which an ocean liner shipwrecks. For the passengers, their utopian voyage has turned to its opposite: the forces of dystopia have prevailed.
Triptych
The missing door
-7minutes pause in the hall-
La habitación perdida (The lost room)
-20 minutes intermission outside the hall-
The hidden floor
Warning to audiences: This show is recommended for audiences over 16 years of age and includes scenes that may offend the sensibilities of the viewer. It contains nudity, graphic violence, disturbing, adult and sexual content, smoke machine, harsh sound effects and strobe lights.
“Oneiric, fantastic and served by performers with hallucinating virtuosity. A great work of art.”
Le Soir 03.02.2022
“At once disturbing, macabre and delightful!” ***** (5 stars)
L'Echo 03.02.2022
“Peeping Tom holds up a mirror to us all and the humor arises from the friction we all experience with the absurdity of everyday life.”
La Libre Belgique 02.02.2022
“Scenes you’d rather expect from the brain of David Lynch. A triptych, with the emphasis on ‘trip’”.
De Morgen 01.02.2022
“Triptych produces uneasiness, reflects on the future of humanity, on relationships, on power, on the unknown, on others and the spiritual, on changes."
Revista El Duende 14.11.2021
“Triptych is a truly dazzling, magical, hypnotic show, a sensory cataract that envelops the spectator and traps him in a spider web of fascination.” ***** (5 stars)
ABC 13.11.2021
"The sounds, the strangeness of the images and the sensations they cause are what make this show last in the memory beyond the moment of its representation. Possibly for a long time."
El País 13.11.2021
“Illusions, fragility, utopias, premonitions, madness, lost loves, inner research and struggle, uncontrolled impulses: themes that the dancers express with thatvirtuosic and sharp language of the body made up of furious holds, acrobatic falls and rebounds, fluid contortions, repeated and blocked movements. Masterful.”
Artribune 22.09.2021
“Participating in a Peeping Tom show proves to be a unique experience, in which all the boundaries of the languages of the scene are mixed" ****1/2 (4,5 stars)
Krapp’s Last Post 21.09.2021
“If you like to explore the extraordinary, through paths exposed to risk, you will not be disappointed."
La Guida 16.09.2021
2023
- TRIPTYCH: Prize for the Best International Theatre Production at the Premis de la Critica
(ES)
- TRIPTYCH: Nomination for ‘Best New Dance Production’ at the Olivier Awards (UK)
2022
- TRIPTYCH: Prize for Best Contemporary Production of 2021 in Italy – Danza & Danza
Magazine (IT)
2021
- LA VISITA: Winner of the FEDORA Van Cleef & Arpels Prize for Ballet 2021
- TRIPTYCH: Nominations for a Critics Award as Best International Dance Production and
Best International Theatre Production (Barcelona, ES)
2018
- MOEDER: ‘Best Theatre Performance’ at the Festival Internacional de Teatro y Artes de
Calle in Valladolid (ES).
2017
- THE MISSING DOOR: Herald Angel at the Edinburgh International Festival (UK) (together
with Stop-Motion and Shoot the Moon by Paul Lightfoot and Sol León)
2016
- THE LOST ROOM: Swan for ‘Most Impressive Dance Production’ (Maastricht, NL)
2015
- 32 RUE VANDENBRANDEN: ‘Best New Dance Production’ at the Olivier Awards (London,
UK)
- VADER: Selection for Het Theaterfestival (BE)
- A LOUER: Nomination for a Critics Award as Best International Dance Production
(Barcelona, ES)
Access is only allowed to children over five years of age.
For further information, please check the general purchase terms and hall conditions.
If you have any questions while purchasing your tickets, you can write to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call 922 568 625 from Monday to Friday from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., except for public holidays.