On Saturday the 25th of February, TORCH gallery opens The Shapeshifter, an exhibition by Anya Janssen. In collaboration with writer Marjolijn van Heemstra videomaker Anneke Savert and me as a composer, Janssen creates a synergistic Gesamtkunstwerk inspired by Ivy: a twelve year old girl that lives partly detached from civilization, together with her mother.

In a small red mobile home she coexists with her animals and nature on the fringe of Dutch urbanity. The stories this girl told Janssen inspired her to create an installation piece, focusing on Ivy's way of shifting personalities between civilization and her own private universe.

Music for The Shapeshifter will be heard as an permanent installation during the exhibitions. The electronic pieces I composed can be heard on my Soundcloud channel.

The catalogue for the project with CD will be available at the gallery, and via Anya Janssen’s website. After the opening the works will be exhibited in TORCH until the 7th of April. The Shapeshifter will then travel to different museums and galleries in The Netherlands. See the agenda for more details.

In the Maurice Maeterlinck year 2011, FIlip Rathé of the Spectra Ensemble asked me to write a companion piece for the poem ‘Les trois soeurs aveugles’.

In Maeterlinck's poem, three blind sisters climb a tower, with their lamps of hope (‘espérons encore’) – a light died out at the end of the song. ‘Elles, vous et nous’ is a stanza that keeps returning in the poem.

But who are ‘they and we’? I imagined them all walking in the tower, the sisters and the musicians of Spectra Ensemble. Climbing the same stone steps, everyone of them clattered up in their own tempo – interrupted increasingly by the wavering light.

The premiere tomorrow in Ghent marks the opening of a festival dedicated to the Nobel Prize winning Belgian poet.

Friday February 3 in the Ghent City Hall (Belgium), 8 PM. Free entrance.

The Song Company and its director Ronald Peelman join forces with Shadow puppeteer Stephen Mushin in Sweet Dreams, a story of dreams and imagination. Using simple silhouette forms Stephen will create a technically remarkable and visually spectacular theatre performance.

Sweet Dreams includes songs, charols, lullabies and stories from composers around the world including Peter Warlock, Jack Body, Elena Kats-Chernin and Annie Lennox. And Sweet Dreams will be the Down Under premiere for my piece Falling.

Sweet Dreams: 2-11 December 2011 in varyous cities in Australia. See the agenda for more details.