No Longer Readymade was created in the transition from New York to Brussels; Meg Stuart and her dancers worked on it during various residencies. Four dead birds hang head down from the ceiling in André Lepecki’s simple stage design, and four isolated performers permanently fail to meet. They move through the no-man’s-land between Samuel Beckett, Francis Bacon and Charlie Chaplin in a state of silence and without biographies while producing a tension between collapse and control. At the beginning of the piece, Benoît Lachambre shakes his head for minutes – his face loses all its contours and his profile dissolves. Later, Meg Stuart looks through her overcoat’s pockets for memorabilia. Self-forgotten, she passes them through her hands and scatters them on the floor. It’s a group of out of place survivors who dig for concealed feelings.

The explicit theatricality of the images Meg Stuart has created, almost force the spectators to an embarrassed silence. The small turning around of very typical cliches of humanity, such as touching or mourning, she suddenly makes them seem totally futile pretentions. Giving sense to these feelings is only a postponement of death which will strike irreversibly.