After the artistic space CABAN, De Spiegel creates a garden in which you can feel and taste, bloom and grow. A pleasure ground for the eyes, ears and especially for the imagination. In this garden, small children grow up a bit, they taste music, movement or images together with their parents or supervisors. There are different things to discover at every eye level. They can sit, lie down or crawl around.
They can sing along, drum, dance and clap. Musicians, dancers or sculptors appear between the graceful curly cabbages, tripping great tits and waving cow parsley. They allow themselves to be pollinated by both the garden and the public, they capture what is in the air and plant music, dance or images. In the course of a session, wonderful sounds, movements or shapes grow out of this. And just like real gardeners in real gardens, the artists in LABOTANIK also intervene in the vegetation, the paths and seeds.
Karel Van Ransbeeck has worked as a puppeteer, director or production designer for several Belgian puppet theatre companies. He taught for several years and has given puppet show workshops in Flanders and the Netherlands. As a puppet manipulator, he has worked for Belgium’s national television and school television channels. Since 1994 Karel Van Ransbeeck has been the artistic director of Theater De Spiegel. On his artistic quest to develop a theatre language with wide public appeal, he always looks for a symbiosis between figures, objects, music, sound and text. In 2004 he created ‘De Rode Draak’ (The Red Dragon), his first theatre production for a specific target group: children aged under three. Work for infants has since been an intrinsic part of Theater De Spiegel. He came up with the concept for several of Theater De Spiegel’s shows, and also directed or designed the set for them. De Spiegel invents exciting places and wonderful worlds and invites you to discover them together.
With theatre, music, dance, images, objects, humour and poetry, De Spiegel stimulates the imagination and sense of adventure. You can find them everywhere: in theatres, concert halls, cultural centres or at festivals, but also in nurseries, libraries, museums or in the open air. The places they play inspire them and vice versa, so the crazier the merrier! De Spiegel travels to large cities and small hamlets, in Flanders, Belgium, Europe, but also in Canada, Japan, South Africa.