In “ob-joie,” acrobat Josse De Broeck and percussionist Jef Callebaut engage in the pleasure they share in holding, feeling, hearing and manipulating an everyday object: the soft murmur of the bristles of a sweeping brush, the warm heart of a candle, the hard chair that nevertheless lovingly cradles your bottom.

In this wordless song of praise, the everyday objects themselves steal the show. Callebaut & De Broeck take them out of context, but retain the wink to that context. How do the objects relate to each other? And how do they balance each other in all sorts of constructions? Through poetic imagery, Callebaut & De Broeck challenge the obvious existence of objects and infuse recognizable situations with un peu de joie and a touch of magic.

The performance is honest and uninhibited. That it is also wordless makes it accessible to a wide audience. You can discern STEM themes such as gravity, balance, center of gravity, kinetic and potential energy. But you can also simply enjoy the subcutaneous, restrained tension with which Callebaut & De Broeck build up their performance.

Jef Callebaut and Josse De Broeck have known each other since childhood and went to circus school together. Josse stayed with the circus and is now part of the acrobat collective Familiar Faces with which he created the hall performance ‘Surface’. He also collaborated in the creation of ‘Screws’ (Alexander Vantournhout), ‘MUUR’ (Floor Van Leeuwen) and ‘Carrying my father’ (THERE THERE Company). Jef followed his other passion, percussion. He created the performance ‘Canto Ostinato on Pink Cloth’ (Ensemble Kwartslag and Dawid Wojtalewicz) and is currently playing the participatory children’s performance ‘MIET SPEELT’ (Miet Ensemble). As a percussionist, “the world around him is his instrument.