Antwerp-based theatre director, actor and visual artist Thomas Verstraeten, a member of the theatre collective FC Bergman, proves for the second time that an urban project can exist on a single theatre stage. Together with composer Heleen Van Haegenborgh, he created Symphony for One Hundred Citizens and a Traffic Light — a large-scale symphony of everyday urban sounds and a video installation. One hundred residents of Antwerp from all corners of the city each play their own “instrument”. On stage, there are no violins, woodwinds or percussion, but cars with growling engines, a sunny terrace with clinking glasses, barking dogs, a wheeled suitcase rattling over cobblestones, a singing street guitarist, a road worker with a jackhammer, a clock striking noon, chirping birds. All these “instruments” together form a sculptural collage of the city on the stage of De Singel in Antwerp — an urban symphony composed according to all the rules of the symphonic genre.
This story began seven years ago in Antwerp. Walking along the central Meir shopping street, Thomas Verstraeten heard his favourite street guitarist playing and stopped to listen. At the same time, he noticed a distant siren sounding in perfect harmony with the musician’s song. Closer by, a dog began to bark. A jackhammer entered like a bass line. “It was as if the universe started speaking,” Verstraeten recalls. The moment reminded him of a legendary action he had recently read about: in 1922, in Baku, Arseny Avraamov conducted his Symphony of Sirens — a monumental composition for ship horns, factory engines, cannons and many other sound sources, as well as a choir of five thousand people. A coincidence of circumstances gave rise to an idea. Verstraeten found a photograph of a symphony orchestra and created a collage, replacing all the traditional instruments with urban equivalents: where there had once been cellos, there were now bicycles and motorcycles; timpani turned into excavators; violinists became street musicians. The result was a powerful image of the city. “I thought: what if Avraamov’s experiment were taken to the extreme and the city itself brought into the concert hall?”
The director of De Singel, Hendrik Storme, immediately embraced the idea and introduced Verstraeten to composer Heleen Van Haegenborgh — a meeting that felt like a “blind date”. Van Haegenborgh set herself the task of accepting the classical silhouette of the symphony as a foundation. She remained faithful to the four-movement symphonic form, with its play of contrasts and repetitions. The word “symphony” itself derives from the Greek sýn (“together, at the same time”) and phōné (“sound, voice”).
The creators asked themselves what form such consonance could take if the orchestra consisted not of strings, winds and percussion, but of cars, machines and a construction site. Van Haegenborgh explained that classical tonal harmony was clearly not applicable here, since the only traditional instruments in the orchestra belonged to street musicians. Instead, she applied the principles of harmony to timbre, seeking blended colours in which radically different sounds together produced a new, unique timbre, while also working with colour modulations. Thus, the second movement became an atmospheric time-lapse from dusk to dawn, in which rain plays the leading role: the composer modulated its “colour”, making the raindrops fall on constantly changing surfaces. The colour palette of the urban symphony developed gradually — over several months, director and composer wandered through the city streets, exchanging photographs, videos and field recordings, aiming to encounter as many people and their sounds as possible. The list of the “orchestra” reads like a logbook of dozens of meetings — with road workers, hip-hop artists, builders, motorcyclists, fairground operators, cleaners, painters, gym-goers, students and countless other city residents.
For each participant, the composer wrote an individual part, allowing the full richness of their everyday “instrument” to emerge. This, too, was a key starting point of the project: the performers do not act in a theatrical sense, but rather carry out their daily activities with the virtuosity inherent to them. It is an ode to the working individual — those who clean, build and lay asphalt every day so that life in Antwerp can be comfortable. Verstraeten’s message is clear: all professions are equal and all are necessary.
A circular dynamic emerged between creators and performers. Van Haegenborgh mapped out routes for each participant, providing clear instructions, while the musical material itself was shaped by the instruments, actions and capabilities of the performers. As a result, the score constantly balances between constraint and freedom, order and chaos. The composer described her symphony as “organised chaos” — an apt metaphor for the functioning of a city as a metropolis (even a relatively small one). Traffic is regulated by traffic lights, yet we pedestrians move like Brownian motion of ions — chaotically. A magnificent metaphor.
The project Symphony for One Hundred Citizens and a Traffic Light continues the ideas of John Cage, who radically expanded the concept of music to include all sounds and relative silence. Thomas Verstraeten and Heleen Van Haegenborgh have created a soundscape in which cars, construction tools and urban noises function as “instruments”, generating new timbres and sonic “colours”, while the participation of one hundred city residents transforms everyday actions into a collective musical performance. At the same time, the preservation of a four-movement symphonic structure and the sonata form of the first movement establishes a dialogue between classical heritage and a contemporary experimental approach to sound. Bravo!