Gorges Ocloo

Gorges Ocloo, born in 1988, is an artist who feels at home in many roles and genres: theatre, music theatre, modern dance, performance, community arts, visual art, scenography and composition for theatre, dance and opera. His visual language is multidisciplinary and magical, his shows are colourful extravaganzas of images, movement and music, fables with often grim political undertones. For him, Voodoo, the culture of his father, is the ultimate synthesis of playing, performance and acting.

After studying at the art secondary school, he graduated from the Royal Institute for Theatre, Cinema & Sound (RITCS) in Brussels as a theatre director. Immediately afterwards in 2014, he created his highly acclaimed first production Scarlet-Anansi-Ocloo. With the story of Medea as his departure point, he explored the link between that mythical primordial mother and genocide, drawing inspiration from Ghanese Anansi stories, Heiner Müller's Medeamaterial and Ben Okri's The Famished Road. Gorges Ocloo has worked in in various capacities in numerous theatre productions and films. Since 2020, he is also the artistic co-director of DE MAAN in Mechelen. There, he creates shows for young audiences, such as the surreal fairy tale ANANSI (2019).

As artist in residence at LOD muziektheater he created Moby Dick, at last Queequeg speaks (2021), a jazzy opera based on a libretto by Ben Okri that mixes Herman Melville's western classic novel with African tales, animistic rituals and voodoo, and the symbolic drama The Butcher, de engel kwam niet (2021). His latest piece The Grief of Red Granny will be the first part of a diptych about individual and collective grief and belongs to Ocloo’s the self-conceived genre of AfrOpera, in which he mixes classics from the Western music repertoire with African traditions, working closely with the Artscape Theatre Centre in Cape Town, South Africa.

Along with Lisaboa Houbrechts, FC Bergman, Benjamin Abel Meirhaeghe and Olympique Dramatique, Gorges Ocloo shares responsibility for the artistic direction of Toneelhuis as of 2022. In May 2022, he received the Cultuurprijs Ultima, the Flemish cultural award for emerging talent.