With this new dance-theatre creation, choreographer Pé Vermeersch pays tribute to the iconic Mata Hari, portraying her as a founding mother of the performing arts, to whom contemporary artists owe much. As one of the first dancers to play with identity and to present her body as a powerful and mysterious medium of expression—freely incorporating Asian dances amid the wave of Orientalism—Mata Hari forged a legend equally shaped by the tragedy of her senseless death. Her execution is one that has survived brilliantly through the years.
Although Pé Vermeersch is not primarily interested in representing Mata Hari’s life, she introduces key facts at the beginning of the work, allowing the audience not only to contextualize but also to sense the tragic dimensions of this iconic performing artist’s life. Pé draws both on autobiographical elements and on the rebellious qualities of Mata Hari’s performances. She ultimately moves beyond narrative and historical vocabulary, developing her own dance language and offering a perception of dance as an experiential, abstract, and poetic journey. Like Mata Hari, she consciously incorporates principles of Eastern dance traditions in a well-studied way.
The Execution of Mata Hari becomes the starting point of the work—an endlessly repeating trajectory that never truly reaches an end, yet unfolds within the poetry of sentient bodies. In The Execution of Mata Hari, Pé seeks once again to create a performance that emerges as an erotic organism, where the body becomes a powerful gesture of resistance and restoration. With her tragic death, Mata Hari may have been sacrificed on the altar of fear and desire—an unfortunately urgent and contemporary issue within our societies.
In a unique scenography, Italian dancer Angela Babuin embodies Mata Hari, flanked by Pé Vermeersch, who sings and dances her soul. A long balance beam functions both as a metaphor for the timeline leading toward Mata Hari’s futile execution and as a fragile, limiting, and challenging space for movement. The relationship between costume and nudity is a central element of the work, developed in collaboration with costume designer Anita Evenepoel. The presence of the man is addressed not in a dominant way, but through a soft, ongoing male gaze projected onto a large screen and through readings by French actor Marc Lesage.
The original soundtrack is composed by George De Decker, using guitar riffs by American singer-songwriter Alissa Cardone.
