Creation 25/26 — For Mata, With Love

A reading of an iconic figure

In her work around Mata Hari, Pé Vermeersch explores the tragedy and complexity of a woman who used her own body as power, as language, as mystery — and who may have been killed and sacrificed because of it. The erotic force that Mata Hari embodied was both her strength and her downfall. Vermeersch approaches this figure not as a myth or a seductress, but as an embodied tension between freedom and desire. Here, Mata Hari is first and foremost seen as a compelling dancer and a ‘mother of performing art.’ Vermeersch delves deeply into the qualities of her performances. In this sense, the piece is a tribute to Mata Hari, not as a spy or courtesan, but as a dancer.

By empathically stepping into the physicality of Mata Hari — not through historical reconstruction, but through inner resonance — Vermeersch brings forth the question: What does it mean, as a woman, to embody your body in a world that seeks to possess, define, or condemn it?

Within this context, the erotic dimension of her work takes on an explicitly political character. Not because the body presents itself to seduce, but because it appears independently, in its own sensory power. The body is not an object, but a subject of intensity. It refuses to serve as a symbol for what the outside world wants to read into it, and instead claims the space to feel, to exist, to disappear.

In our contemporary society, it is precisely this kind of body — a body that feels, refuses, transforms — that continues to be targeted, projected upon, and controlled. It is essential that these bodies be liberated from the gaze that confines, exoticizes, or condemns them.

Where Mata Hari’s body may have been sacrificed on the altar of fear and desire, Vermeersch uses performance as a space to reclaim that body — not as an icon, but as a breathing, sensing, autonomous organism. In that choice lies a powerful act of resistance and restoration: a body that reveals its eroticism without surrendering to the gaze, that feels rather than poses, that asserts its presence through intensity and surrender, not through representation.

With  Angela Babuin as protagonist

Mira Walschot and Pé Vermeersch as chorus

Setting made by the collective radical hearts

Costumes Anita Evenepoel

Original soundscore  by George De Decker and Alissa Cardone