Tempest

ImpulsTanz [ENA] In Tempest, Lisbeth Gruwez offers a taut, electrifying solo that treats anger not as something to be tamed or denied, but as a material to be studied, channelled and ultimately transformed. Drawing on Martial Arts, she enters the stage as a “durchlässiger Körper” – a permeable body – stepping straight into the eye of the emotional storm to test how far raw rage can be re‑worked into focused strength.

Gruwez’s background—Royal Ballet School Antwerp followed by P.A.R.T.S., and collaborations with many of the major figures in Belgian dance—has always shown in her extraordinary control of dynamics and timing. In Tempest, that craft is turned towards the “duale Kraft” of anger: its destructive potential and its capacity to catalyse change. The movement language alternates between sharp, attack‑like strikes and slower, attentive listening phases. Kicks, pivots, and sudden drops carry the syntax of Martial Arts, but are stripped of combat spectacle; instead, they become research tools, tracing how an impulse of violence can be redirected, re‑routed through breath, balance and relation to space.

One of the most striking aspects of the piece is Gruwez’s refusal to fix anger in a single image. Rather than presenting “rage” as a theatrical mask, she lets it appear as shifting intensities: tremors in the hands, tightening and release in the torso, changes in proximity to the floor. At times her body seems on the verge of explosion, energy pushed to the edge of what it can hold; at others, that same force is condensed into extremely precise, almost minimal gestures. You sense that the aim is not catharsis, but transformation—how to inhabit anger without being consumed by it.

The sound world, shaped with Maarten Van Cauwenberghe, works hand in hand with this investigation. Rhythmic pulses rise and fall like internal pressure waves, sometimes driving movement into flurries, sometimes receding to allow silence to thicken around a held stance or a slow, deliberate shift of weight. The overall sensation is that of a storm system being mapped from within: turbulence, pockets of calm, sudden fronts of intensity.

Crucially, Tempest also touches on the relational dimension of anger. Even as Gruwez is alone onstage, the choreography suggests clashes of elements—air and ground, tension and release, self and world—meeting and recombining. Her “through‑body” becomes a site where these collisions can fuse into new forms rather than simply cancel each other out. The solo doesn’t offer moral lessons about rage; instead, it proposes a bodily practice for engaging it differently, recognising its power while refusing its simplest destructive scripts.

As a continuation of Voetvolk’s explorations after The Sea Within, Tempest confirms Gruwez and Van Cauwenberghe’s capacity to make intense states legible without flattening them. It is a piece that leaves you with the sense that anger, when handled with the kind of rigor and sensitivity shown here, can indeed be more than explosion: it can be a strange, risky path towards change—one that begins, quite literally, in how we move.