Is a performance project that was created in situ throughout Bâtard Festival (Brussels 2020), and it can continue performing upon invitation by other venues, festivals, curations.

Love stores premiere is available upon call as a site specific edition to contain different love processes in the diversity of contexts where intimate relationships happen. As a container, it qualifies similarly to a womb, it presents, exercises, acknowledges, prepares and announces research about love.







In the duration of 15-25 mins, the appointment is choreographed for the reception, integration and transferring of the conversation with one audience member who can choose for anonymity.

At Batard, it was located inside the festival´s heart - installed with a glass-window view to multiple levels of Beursschouwburg arquitecture.



The final day of the festival,in the form of a report based on the 33 appointments.

01.02 - 20h30,2020 Performing live appointments about love, Project(ion) room - Brussels



28.01 - 31.01, 2020 One-to-one appointments about love - BEURSSCHOUWBURG, Brussels

Batard Festival, 2020
curated by Sabine Cmelniski and Bouchra Lamsyeh

Counselling: Adriano Wilbert Jensen

special thanks to: Ana Vujanovic and Sabine Cmelniski

with the support of: Workspacebrussels, a.pass

Andrea is standing next to a blackboard on the left side of the stage. I decide to sit right in front of her, well, I did not decide myself, Simon Asencio brought me there and I think he had the right intuition. The day before I dreamt about another person sitting in the audience, very close to me, I want to see their reactions but I feel kind of shy when I look at them. I feel attraction, an invented sexual tension and some affection - but it was all a dream. I’m telling all this to be aware that this day, like the previous days throughout the one-to-one appointments, each of us arrived to the theater with our fantasies, expectations and projections and Andrea with her super powers collected them.




In her work I see a perfect awareness of the choreographic tools she puts into play. It is a way of doing from choreography, understanding that it has the potential to change perception.
In Love stores premiere I can see her ability to put things in the place they need to be in each moment. I think that the choreography in this case has less to do with a technical which refers to composition and more to do with a form that intuitively connects with other layers of sensing, making sense, and the ability to transmit them. I can see Andrea's careful listening, how she balances the fixed signs and opens up other possibilities. I can see the materiality of her thinking, how ideas move and look for ways to be assembled. Laura Ramírez says that deep down she is a painter, a craftswoman who is laying out layer after layer. They are all necessary to reach the surface and in some mysterious way she makes them all visible at the end.

The presentation of Love stores premiere in Projection Room was based on the one-to-one appointments about love Andrea had held during the whole week in Beursschouwburg. When I think about what she did on stage I remember a question I heard Adriano Wilfert Jensen -who accompanied her process- pose several times: how to ask a question in public? Love stores premiere seemed to me like a way to exercise that problem and figure out how to present it. It was a provisional way of answering it with what Andrea had at that very moment. This gesture is clear in the dramaturgy of the presentation which, on the one hand, shows that the parallels between the structure of the theatre (performer-audience) and love relationships (me-you as in I love you – because in the discourse on love there is always someone/something we are addressing) are many and productive and, on the other hand, arises from the perception of having experienced the construction of a love relationship from the accumulation of appointments she has had during the week: It began with surprise, followed by mystery and expectations, the patterns of the relationship were drawn, the roles and the vulnerabilities shown…
It was a formal dramaturgy to support that which was being built between the audience and Andrea for an hour, which was the time we had until the next piece began as written in the program of Bâtard Festival.
There was a kind of honesty with the form and with how the experience had been given to her, but also something very generous that made us all feel involved. I think that not only those of us who had been on the appointments, love is capable of touching all of us and those present, summarized in that "YOU" that Andrea pronounced with insistence to tell that story of love made of many stories, could connect.

Andrea carries on telling our love story and at one point she offers to draw us. She explains the methodology with which she is going to do it –follow the contour of things overlapping without ever lifting the pen from the sheet of paper– and places the blackboard so we cannot see it. For five minutes she observes the audience and gives us an image of ourselves. It's a similar movement to the one she did when she wrote a song for us in the one-to-one appointments, a kind of gift or dedication. I've always thought that good gifts have as much to do with the person who gives them as with the person who receives them, and this seemed like a great gift to me. Condensed in this gesture I see Andrea's interest in transmission and the magnetism of her presence as a performer. I notice that it is desire driving the action and a question that often appears in my mind comes back: do you have tools to sense your desires and needs? In this piece I felt that Andrea had those tools, but not only to feel her own needs but a beautiful and intelligent ability to listen to the audience and an extraordinary care for how the gestures, concepts and intensities are transmitted. Because maybe telepathy doesn't exist and is only listening and gazing as powerfully as she does.

Text by curator and producer Andrea Rodrigo, with excerpts from *a letter to You (in pink)

I wrote a letter for you assuming who you are on our one-to-one appointment about love. Can I read it to you?

You trust me even though you don’t know where this is leading into. You are far enough for us to not touch and close enough for us to transfer the feeling of touching. We look at each other as if our eyes are touching. You open your ears and heart to make sure you will stay alive while this lasts.

You are all I need right now and I am not sure what you need or what I can give you, but in about 15 minutes someone else will come and we will have to finish our appointment.

You, I [have] imagined many many times and always thought of the most beautiful ways in which you would be happy right now.

promo photo by Lucia Fernandez Millet

photo by Cillian O'neill

As an experiment and performance takes the form* of

and a report performance:

One-to-one appointments about love

performing live appointments about love

one-to-one appointments about love

Performing live appointments about love

curated by Sabine Cmelniski and Bouchra Lamsyeh

Love stores premiere

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*Both forms are choreographed to be radically open to the moment of the encounter, which can be different in every performance

Love stores premiere

Love stores premiere also works as a supportive structure to premiere the book Love Stories