In hefty plays like The Goldberg Chronicles (2014) and The Winter’s Tale (2016), the company took a fresh, bold approach in exploring the interplay between drama, visual art, choreography, costumes, performance and music. 

1095 takes us back to the eleventh century. Benny, a young Benedictine monk, flees the Abbey of Ghent and travels through Europe in exile. In the southern French town of Clermont in that same year of 1095, Pope Urbanus II gives a notorious sermon in which he exhorts the populace to rid the holy city of Jerusalem of the enemies of every Christian – Muslims. It is here that the summons to the Crusades is launched.

1095 is a story about the mystery surrounding the spirit of an age, about moderation and extremism. It is a physical production that focuses on brute control.

Lisaboa Houbrechts aims to reduce human interactions to their essence, to make pure, raw emotions tangible. The result is an unsettling journey from Flanders to the Loire region and via Barcelona to the destroyed caliphate of Cordoba. 1095 is not a realistic play. It examines the relation to reality. It is about alienation and the appropriation of history. Is there such thing as a historical performance? What are the machinations of a body that has survived throughout the centuries?