Gather a band of kids, boxes of pastels, gallons of paint and some jazz, and you get WASCO!, a spontaneous burst of action painting made for children and led by them. It's wild, chaotic, untamed — and sometimes very gentle. Pastels and brushes in hand, ten performers aged six to twelve build a whole world of their own from scratch, far from the grown-ups', until it becomes an actual painting. "To choreograph is to draw in space," Lisbeth Gruwez reminds us, summing up the whole idea.
With musician Maarten Van Cauwenberghe, she explores what links drawing, music and dance, turning movement into something close to a painterly material, driven by the pulse of the music. To jazz recorded between 1945 and 1965 — the golden age of action painting — the children take over the space, redrawing and painting it through free movement phrases, sometimes as a group, sometimes in smaller clusters. And if freedom had a shape, what would it look like? Here the children play with two legacies of postwar America: the carefree improvisation of free jazz and the instinctive splashes of abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock — a playground perfectly in tune with their own. Carried by a raw, joyful, festive energy, the piece reawakens the urge to create in a delightful ritual. WASCO! invites all ages to color outside the lines.