Three days at Horst: My festival redemption arc

I haven’t been to a festival since 2021 when I attended Brainchild. The entire ground melted into deep mud and the porta-loo extractor van exploded leaving no way of distinguishing the two ‘materials’. I swore I’d never attend another. Yet here I am on the Eurostar heading to Horst in Brussels, a three day electronic music festival that fuses art, architecture and music.

Why did I agree to this? I first met the artist Jaya Twill many years ago at a house party where she arrived late dressed in a ball gown, her Texan laugh bouncing around the garden. We spoke endlessly about the theatre. A few days later we met for coffee at Bar Italia. A few days after that we went to see Mamma Mia The Musical and, as we both ogled at topless men prancing around the stage whilst we danced in the front row of the dress circle, I felt in my stomach the origins of a lifelong friendship. Since then, Jaya has been integral to my life both personally and professionally. It’s been a pleasure to witness her emerge as an incredible performer. I’ve watched her masturbate to a Žižek lecture in a mouldy cavern underneath Waterloo Station and balance naked on a bicycle seat in Marina Abramović’s retrospective at the Royal Academy. And now, I am accompanying her to Horst to watch her perform in Eddie Peake’s performance work The Pervert.

I was first introduced to Eddie Peake when I Googled him aged 16. His website featured only a bright pink dick pic. There was something about the audacity of a professional artist presenting themselves solely through their erect penis that struck a chord. I had asked Jaya to tell me nothing about The Pervert. After a day of frolicking around Horst experiencing the breadth of the art programming including Joshua Serafin’s dynamic installation Buried in a Coffin the Size of a Grain of Rice and, re-connecting with the ket-monster that I had buried deep within myself (just kidding, editor :)), I found myself sitting alone with a double tequila tonic facing the empty stage. The Pervert was programmed at 7.30pm each night so that it coincided with the sunset – a challenging time to draw a crowd in the middle of an electronic music festival, just as DJs are revving people up in preparation for the long night to come. “Performing for a distracted audience is all the more fulfilling when they decide to lock in; it’s an accomplishment,” Twill told me. So I was pleasantly surprised when the Rain Room, a repurposed building named after the broken skylights that allowed rain to pour through, was full to bursting point. 

The Pervert began with the arrival of the title character (played by Juliette Mello), who was nude aside from gold body paint and striking tri-coloured clown makeup. Then Eddie Peake appeared, wearing a black tracksuit and similar clown makeup. He began by sweeping the stage, ritualistically preparing the performance space like it was a karesansui garden. He was followed by Kirke Gross activating the space with her cello, followed by dancers Kieram Corrin Mitchell and Emma Fisher who began by painting their nude bodies gold, mimicking the act of applying body lotion while intimately checking each other’s backs and armpits. Finally, Twill, also nude and playing the role of Eddie Peake, joined the ceremonial process of transforming the human body into an art object. Twill floated around the stage whilst Mitchell and Fischer cycled through a complex, highly sexualised choreographed repetition motif rooted in ballet technique. At times the dancers would confront audience members, thrusting their genitals in faces or humping each other on the cold concrete floor. The ‘first act’ of the performance culminated with an Artuadian scream inciting the text to begin: “of an unwashed penis fills the room…” 

Jaya explained that “we always lose a few people as the text begins, because it begins very intimately and emotionally. It took me a while to understand the audience, how to control them.” Expertly delivered by Twill, the writing was a declaration of personal perversions, bolstered by childhood memories that attempted to explore why and how we come to behave sexually as adults. She expresses “Eddie’s text felt true to me. I love when I find a line uncomfortable, or difficult to deliver: it means something dynamic is happening and I get to explore why”. It reminded me of Sarah Kane: the kind of sacred writing that no matter how it’s acted, is indistinguishable from the author’s voice. You are totally aware that what’s being recounted is reality, memory, truth, not some fabricated fiction. Jaya didn’t imprint onto the text, but rather acted as a vessel, allowing it to flow through her. Essentially, The Pervert was a delicate collage of performance disciplines that interacted like astrological orbits, fluctuating between alignment and canon. Beyond a conventional musical, Peake’s piece proves how the combination of music, text and movement can be dissected, re-explored, and re-activated powerfully.

Each performer continued with their ritualistic acts, slowly building in intensity until the orgasmic climax. Twill writhed around the concrete: cumming as the text flowed through her like some divine sexual energy while Peake blasted an electronic score in tandem with the emotional depth of the cello. The dancers were now cycling through their choreography at full intensity, pushing their bodies to extremes, makeup dripping off their faces. Then, silence. Mitchell and Fischer continued through their final motifs, the sound of their breath and body forming the closing soundtrack. It was a demonstration of pure energetic synchronicity, reminiscent of a Spanish Flamenco. “It’s a very physically and emotionally intense experience. Emma and Kierem put their bodies through so much. The energy and intensity built up within our bodies day after day culminating with the final performance as this magical explosion,” Jaya told me.

After the performance I wanted to go home and think. I felt completely exhausted. I was jealous of Peake’s awareness of his own sexuality and his confidence to express that so explicitly and freely. Twill described Peake as “an open wound”, who bled across the stage in gold. This vulnerability and expert understanding of the mechanics of performance is how the theatre is revived: British theatre, take note. I was not only able to witness this feat of theatrical and psycho-sexual engineering, but I was also privileged enough to stay with the performers. The entire experience felt reminiscent of Peter Brook’s experimental touring theatre.

On Friday, after the second performance and some recuperation in the VIP lounge, Jaya and I re-entered the festival. An electric guitar called to us like a siren. Jaya, pumped full of adrenaline, ran towards the celestial riff which brought us through the forest to the Moon Ra stage (Curated by Kiosk Radio and The Lot Radio): An intimate UFO-esque structure designed by Leopold Banchini, a Swiss architect firm who previously designed a permanent installation for the Centre Pompidou. It floated at knee height – as you passed around its perimeter hunting for the entrance, only bopping legs and feet were visible, seemingly holding up the hovering structure. People ran towards as music spilled from underneath, ducking under its edge to enter. Inside was a complex network of wooden beams that reminded me of medieval church rafters, as though we were dancing towards the Gods. The very tip of the structure featured a ship-like porthole, cracked ajar so that the sun, stars and, most importantly the moon, could beat through and illuminate the dancefloor. In essence, Moon Ra was a chapel built to worship the sky. The guitar revealed itself to be One Kiss, Fathers of Sound, delivered by musclecars, a DJ and producer duo from New York, which dissolved into the best house-disco set I’ve ever experienced, sucking me into a fever dream caught between 1990s Ibiza and ‘70s New York.

Jaya had to drag me from the depths of the dancefloor to continue our drive-by of the festival. We were summoned by earth rumbling bass to the Weaving Weeds stage, curated by Resident Advisor and designed by Atelier Fanelsa and the Bioregional Design Lab of the Technical University of Munich. This structure operated like a gladiator pit: the perimeter was a raised platform that slowly descended into a lowered dancefloor, canopied by large worm-like undulations created by processing and repurposing an invasive weed species present in Asiat Park, where the festival is now held. The architecture allowed for sound to pool in the pit forming a swamp of bass that one could literally swim in. As we descended further into the sonic morass, the bass escalated to bone trembling. We were experiencing The Bug presents Machine (live): AKA British producer Kevin Martin, known for his live shows that merge dubstep, dancehall and industrial hip-hop. A pure demonstration of the experimentation facilitated at Horst. The ear plugs buried beneath my hands pressed tight against my ears meant I could handle a mere ten minutes of the skeletal massage before my ear drums dropped to their knees and begged for mercy. It pushed against the limits of acceptability, of what a human body can sonically handle. It was disgustingly filthy… in the most delicious way. If you need to know what it’s like to feel your own bone marrow trying to escape your body, then I urge you to see The Bug live. The expert programming of each stage mimicked its essence: where Moon Ra was reaching and celestial, Weaving Weeds was bodily, digestive, organic, decaying. 

Other notable music performances included Eclair Fifi’s set at Dark Skies (designed by Banchini Bierens De Haan and DVS1), whose mastery of the decks almost turned me straight, Hannah Holland and Josh Caffé at Le Soleil Rouge (designed by Bruther) where the packed crowd reflected in a giant red sun, opposing a Marilyn Minter video installation projected on the imposing industrial chimney towers, and finally SHYBOI, who spent twenty minutes deconstructing Carmina Burana: O Fortuna by Carl Orff (more commonly known as The X Factor theme tune).

I have an obsession with the experimental. I love to witness boundaries being pushed against, broken and reformed. In most settings, true experimentation isn’t possible. I spoke with Louise Goegeber, the curator of the arts programme, before the final performance of The Pervert. She explained how her job also encompassed fundraising, so that all artists, architects and musicians could operate without limitation. Normally, arts programming at music festivals exists as a tokenistic ‘add-on’ – as something that attempts to prove an engagement further than just music. At Horst it was integral, treated with as much importance as the music. The festival made me realise the irrelevancy of the commercial art world; it suddenly looked like a vacuous facade that hides the ruins of true artistic freedom. I was in awe at the work that Goegeber and the rest of the Horst team are doing. I encourage arts institutions to study Horst’s structure, where art is facilitated not for capitalist gain, nor as a status symbol, nor as financial assets to be traded, but where the artist is placed at the forefront, their needs for experimentation and freedom prioritised over anything else. At Horst, the idea of ‘the total artwork’, or ‘the contemporary gesamtkunstwerk’ was activated in full force. The breadth of artistic disciplines unite to form a powerful machine that, when combined with the mass ritualistic worship of a festival, rediscover the ultimate, divine power of the arts.