Cummings and Goings TRY OUT

Poems by E. E. Cummings (1894–1962), performed by the renowned actor Josse De Pauw, accompanied and underpinned by Eric Thielemans’ exploratory percussion, staccato grooves and melodic drumming, as well as by the music of composer and pianist Kris Defoort, which moves between composition and improvisation.

Three unique voices. Performing, searching, singing, speaking, exploring. Cummings’s work is regarded as avant-garde due to his formal, syntactic and linguistic experiments. The poet invented his own words and imbued existing words with personal meaning. He conceived the poem both as a visual object on the page and as a text intended to be read and spoken aloud. In “Cummings and goings”,

Thielemans, De Pauw and Defoort, in turn, add their own interpretation to this innovative work through a musical rendition. ‘Cummings and goings’ is presented in the form of a concert in which each performer wears headphones. The result is both introspective and expressive, musically maximalist and deeply resonant, with no explicit translation in the performance. It is as if the audience were invited to witness the intimacy of a recording session.