Aïda Gabriëls

Aïda Gabriëls (1993) is a transdisciplinary stage director who fuses theatre, contemporary and classical music, visual arts, movement, literature, and fashion into a sensory, layered performance language. Starting from opera as a foundational form, she develops projects where disciplines intertwine, performers shift roles, and societal themes are explored through ever-changing constellations.

Since her debut with the soundscape opera Medeamaterial (2016), she has built a hybrid body of work where concert halls, museums, and stages merge. In I Am the Enemy You Killed, My Friend (2017), she examined guilt and war through Britten’s War Requiem; in Dance of the Seven Veils (2021), she reimagined the Salomé narrative as a critique of the male gaze. The Wild Stage (2022) delved into the desire to escape in chaotic times, through a universe oscillating between pop, baroque, and electronica.

In 2024, she premieres Passages, a site-specific project at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, and Ethereal Realms – all Fiction is Metaphor, a performative installation inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s feminist science fiction. At the same time, she co-creates SEISMIC, an immersive concert performance with composer Maria W. Horn and the Ictus ensemble, in which sound, light, and movement merge into a single fluctuating body.

Aïda is co-founder of the artist collective oester, together with dramaturge Tessa Vannieuwenhuyze. oester is an associate artist at Muziektheater Transparant and artist-in-residence at KMSKA and Ancienne Belgique.