Paradise Regained

Paradise Regained is a large-scale collaborative music-theatre work created with conductor Nicolas Taboulot, choreographer Shila Anaraki, and the students and teachers of GO! Atheneum Emanuel Hiel in Schaarbeek. Bringing together spoken word, choir, solo song, instrumental music and dance, it grew from the collaboration between those who teach and those who learn. Its three parts approach paradise from different perspectives. Lampedusa portrays the promised land a refugee tries to reach despite the risk of death. Pyramus and Thisbe explores a love that can be reunited only through death, transforming both the lovers and nature itself. In-Sanity concludes the work with the individual’s attempt to give meaning to their own existence, on the fragile boundary between sanity and madness. The quest for paradise has no final ending: each conclusion becomes a new beginning. Paradise Regained was presented in Brussels on 12 March 2015; the complete filmed performance is available online.