http://www.damagedgoods.be

Damaged Goods was founded in Brussels in 1994 and is inextricably bound up with Meg Stuart (1965, New Orleans, USA), the creative force behind the company. The name Damaged Goods arises out of Stuart’s fascination with the imperfections of the human body. In spite of their characteristic and unusual movement idiom, such productions as Disfigure Study (1991), No longer readymade (1993) and No One is Watching (1995) were an immediate success with both Belgiand and European audiences.

Damaged Goods has gradually developed an individual poetics all its own. One of its recurrent features is the search for new forms of co-operation, presentation contexts and the ‘crossbreeding’ of theatre, architecture and visual art. In the mid-1990s Stuart collaborated with visual artists, such as Bruce Mau, Lawrence Malstaf, Gary Hill and Ann Hamilton for her Insert Skin series. In close collaboration with director Stefan Pucher and video artist Jorge León she developed the in situ project Highway 101 (2000-01) in six different cities.

 “I could say that for me all movement expresses desire. Not simply physical desire or the erotic or the material desire of wanting, owning or inhabiting something but the desire to make contact, to announce to expose oneself to the viewer and the other on stage. Consequently all movement also expresses and incorporates the missing, the failed communication, the censored and all conditions real or projected that block any action or connection from taking place. Often my choreographies are constructed from impossible tasks, such as the will to compress time, to rewrite one’s history, to live in many bodies at once, to fully experience the pain of another, to embrace emptiness, to show all perspectives of a complex situation in a single gesture. ” (Meg Stuart – December 2007)

Through residencies in Schauspielhaus Zürich (2000-04) and Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz Berlin (since 2005), Stuart became acquainted with the German theatre context, which led to collaborations with directors Stefan Pucher, Frank Castorf and Christoph Marthaler. In that context, Stuart has also explored large scale production, from ALIBI over It’s not funny to Do Animals Cry. Yet special projects still tempt her. In the vein of the groundbreaking improvisation series Crash Landing, initiated in 1996 with Christine De Smedt and David Hernandez, Stuart keeps engaging with various improvisation projects, including the series Auf den Tisch! (since 2005) and Politics of Ecstasy (2009) in collaboration with Jeremy Wade and Eike Wittrock. Her work was shown at Documenta X and for Manifesta7 in Bolzano she created the video installation The only possible city.

Meg Stuart received the Mobil Pegasus Award at the Sommertheaterfestival in Hamburg (1994) for No Longer Readymade; the Culture Award of the Catholic University of Leuven (2000); the German theatre prize Der Faust (2006) for her choreography of Replacement; the French Prize of Criticism (2008) for Blessed; a special prize for Maybe Forever at the Bitef Festival in Belgrade (2008); a Bessie Award in New York (2008) for her body of work; a Flemish Culture Award in the category performing arts (2008).