Created by the Belgian artist Miet Warlop, it is another entry in the History/ies of Theatre series that the Belgian playhouse NTGent and Milo Rau have developed. The question they ask artists in Ghent is: What is your story as a theatre maker? Warlop’s answer is One Song, which played at the Avignon Festival in 2022, got a standing ovation, which is unusual in such an educated and demanding forum. The New York Times said it was one of the best montages of the year and The Guardian gave it 4 stars. That's all well and good, but anyone who has already seen a Warlop production doesn't need convincing any further. The magnetism is immediate, and you are going to want to see anything signed with Miet Warlop’s name. If you have never seen any of her work, now is the time to do so. The overflow of wit, the hidden depth amid an absurd comedy, the almost circus-like skill of its performers, the dialogue between the scenic and plastic arts, the surprise that is drawn on your face from the first moment and the feeling of being like a child discovering incredible universes, are good credentials.

One song also has a personal component for the creator. It becomes an exorcism of the grief and pain of the death of a loved one. All in a crescendo that is built based on repeating a single song, the title song, in a series of variations that traps you as a spectator and shakes you. It can transform any feeling. The last verse of the song goes: “You think you’re silent and, in a bubble, but everyone around you smells your problems”. Why hide away those painful emotions, despite how negative society views them and bring them into a group’s mixture. What can start as a painful and horrible sensation can be turned into an excuse to celebrate life. Life is two days long. It is better to spend it singing and dancing than to lose it to internal sacrifice.

Twelve performers enter the stage in a mesmerising ritual about farewell, life and death, hope, and resurrection. Through the metaphor of a live competition/concert, Miet Warlop invites us to form a community and lift each other up, as in a celebration. The temporary thus becomes the universal, and the personal becomes something of the collective. That is the subtext of ONE SONG: how one song can give meaning to a whole society. Unity in diversity. Miet Warlop explains: “And as human beings, we are, willingly and unwillingly, a gladiator, in conflict with time. Beauty and comfort cannot be grasped but happen to us. The need to connect makes us both vulnerable and tragic. Vulnerable in our physical limitations, despite the efforts we make to strengthen our bodies. And tragic in our existential loneliness, the result of an awareness that is peculiar to mankind.”

A group of performers enters the arena to bring to life the strands of life surrounding saying goodbye forever, hope, and rebirth. Again and again, someone stands up to push their boundaries. The moment when we can transcend our thinking body. It brings together elements that Warlop has been trying out and developing in previous performances, such as the sound and choreographic patterns repeated in a ritualistic way, the joint breathing that chases away everyone's fears and demons, the physical effort as a metaphor, the colourful art and the brazen daring, the relationship with objects and their newfound relevance... A singularity that confers cult status, a happy anomaly that is made from a fragile balance between what happens on stage and what the audience experiences, a chaos of complex emotions, frenetic, exalted, playful and brilliant.