Marijke De Roover
In 2018, Marijke De Roover (born in 1990 in Belgium, lives and works in Ghent) presented a performance at the HISK in Ghent entitled Feel Estate (properties of time/house your day going?), a musical monologue about alternative realities and perceptions of time and space. The performance was based around emails that the artist herself had sent over the years and revolved around the question of whether there is a way to exist beyond time, beyond the body and beyond the spirit.
In The Eggcellent Adventures of Marijke De Roover / Part 1: A Womb of One’s Own (2018), a performance in the form of a musical TED Talk, De Roover examines questions about the nuclear family, feminism, motherhood and the ethics of procreation. The format of the musical lecture gave her the opportunity to combine sociological and pseudo-sociological research with personal experiences and musical elements, with the intention of evoking emotional responses from the audience. In songs inspired by fairy tales, she created a mythical story about the conception and upbringing of a baby in a non-heteronormative family.
On 5 October, Marijke De Roover will be presenting her latest work Live, Laugh, Limerence (2019), a short version of which premieres this week at the Frieze Art Fair in London, but will be presented in full at Garage Rotterdam. In this opera performance, De Roover examines our ideas about romantic love and ‘limerence’, which can be defined as an involuntary state of intense romantic longing.
Marijke De Roover:
In ‘Live, Laugh, Limerence’ I question the impact of how we choreograph and culturally organize the performance of love on what we feel inside and who we become. (…)
Songs often attempt to describe how we feel when we’re in love. But as they’re describing, they are also telling us how we should feel, creating norms we can compare to our own experiences, giving us language that helps us describe a realm of emotion that in some sense is always beyond language. Singing isn’t just an expression of feelings, it’s a performance of an expression of feelings. (…)
Opera expresses itself through viceral methods and spews its emotion from a very primal and instinctive place using the most abstract of art forms, music. Opera is a refractioning of reality and has the ability to make everything seem larger. (…)
The real quest in this opera is to shift from the idea of sexuality and sexual liberation/equality as the main feminist subject to agency and choice in romantic relationships. To unlearn the definitions of love and romance and binary thinking to reveal a much more complex but exciting wirework of emotional, erotical, and intellectual togetherness.