As you like it - Solo
outcome 1
2025 - 2026
In As You Like It - Solo, choreographer and dancer Mirte Bogaert turns her body into a living question, inviting the audience to explore desire, vulnerability, and the gaze. This solo moves sensuously along the edges of pleasure and voyeurism, beauty and tension, teasing what is seen and what is felt. Born from over two years of research into the naked body and its cultural charge, the performance pulses with curiosity, intimacy, and reflection.
Inspired by her journey to Japan, Bogaert examines how Western ideals of nudity, sexuality, and the female body have shaped Japanese perspectives, from the Meiji era to post–World War II. Encounters with Japanese strip theatres, where hidden codes shape every gesture, fed the creation of a piece that is at once provocative, playful, and intimate.The work unfolds through a tension between visibility and invisibility. The female body becomes a site of negotiation—between social codes and inner impulses, vulnerability and agency, pleasure and disorientation. It moves in multiplicity: sometimes ritualistic, sometimes sexualized, sometimes animalistic, tracing the boundaries between inner landscapes and outer forms. Gestures slip between expression and concealment, seduction and resistance, dismantling social choreography without simply rejecting it. Costumes and scenography extend the body beyond the skin, creating points of contact with the audience and dissolving the borders between watcher and watched.
Throughout the creative process, Bogaert collaborated with curator and writer Ive Stevenheydens, interdisciplinary artist Avni Sethi, and lighting designer Ryoya Fudetani. Their contributions shaped the conceptual, sonic, and visual fabric of the performance, enriching its layered exploration of the politics of the body, visibility, and intimacy.
As You Like It - Solo teases, challenges, and stretches what it means to be seen and to see. It inhabits a space where the body withdraws from easy readability, finding its own language, oscillating between exposure and retreat, the socially legible and the intimately unknowable. Above all, it comes alive in the audience’s gaze—a slow, compelling encounter where performer and spectator meet in curiosity, reflection, and desire.
Choreography and performance: Mirte Bogaert Music and Sound: Ive Stevenheydens Dramaturgical Companion: Avni Sethi Light design: Ryoya Fudetani Costume design: Nayaritas Tailor-Designer
Residencies: Charleroi Danse (BE), BUDA (BE), Bergen Dansesenter (NO), Samvirket PreForm Fjaler (NO)
Thank you: Lucius Romeo Fromm, Sølvi Katrine Andersen, Kyoko Iwaki, Hussein Chalayan, Marit Sandsmark, Iver Findlay, Jennifer Merlyn Scherler, Floris Bogaert, Luca Domenico Artus, Bjørnar Skaar Haveland, Mai Lisa Guinoo and Adrian Bartczak
As you like it participated in Forecast Forum 2025 (DE)
Supported by: Charleroi Danse (BE), FFUK (NO), Statens Kunstnerstipend – arbeidsstipend (NO)
