«Bruzz» No.1688: "Happy Birthday Ictus"
Ictus is the living musical heritage of the flourishing performing arts scene in Brussels that seized on the fallow cultural landscape of the 1980s and began to shape an identity that garnered increasing international acclaim. The ensemble concretely emerged through a schism within Maximalist!, which provided the contemporary soundtracks for the first dance productions by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Wim Vandekeybus.
“Are we going to perform contemporary music in a mainstream way? That was the major point of disagreement,” pianist Jean-Luc Plouvier tells us. Along with guitarist Tom Pauwels, Plouvier is currently artistic coordinator. “There was the radical faction, with people like Eric Sleichim and Peter Vermeersch who wanted to make amplified, physical music, not contemporary bullshit. And there were the moderates like Thierry De Mey, Dirk Descheemaeker, and me, who wanted to combine the two and who eventually founded Ictus, which was to perform more composed work.” Others were daunted by that double, ambiguous identity between contemporary and experimental, but for Ictus is has always been a leitmotif, an anchor even