In 2015, approximately 50 million people will suffer from some form of dementia. People who forget where they left their keys, how to put one foot in front of the other or who the people are whom they love.

 

For years, choreographer Ugo Dehaes has been working with universal themes from his immediate surroundings. When he saw a loved one’s health deteriorate through dementia, and the pain and uncertainty that this brought their family, he went looking for a way to translate these complex processes to the stage.

 

In earlier work, Ugo Dehaes had successfully dealt with a number of social phenomena and with how to pass emotions from stage to the audience. In DMNT, he tries to fathom the process of dementia by trying to understand what goes on in the mind of the dementia sufferer. He translates the physical patterns to the stage. Through movement, the viewer gets to see what it is to forget, how concentration turns into obsession, how thoughts evolve, and how old memories continually recur. The result is a physical trio, in which he dances alongside Kayoko Minami and Charlotte Vanden Eynde.