Bluebeard’s Castle is one of the early 20th century’s most intense and incisive operas. Béla Bartók and his librettist have beautifully managed to capture the depths to which the human soul can sink, in a piece that impresses and unsettles you from the first note to the very last. 

Siebe Thijs has adapted this work for a cast of fifteen musicians, which lends the music an intimacy that borders on the invasive. Following the gaze of Judith as she ventures deeper into Bluebeard's world, the video takes us into the mysterious corridors of the Brussels Palace of Justice. Through a shifting landscape of architectural spaces, vivid abstract images and haunting traces of the past, the performance explores the boundaries between intimacy and mystery, light and darkness, the desire to understand another person and the impossibility of ever fully knowing them.