Introduction

For the seventh edition of the Beaufort Triennial, Beaufort 21, Ari Benjamin Meyers, in collaboration with the walking orchestra "Die Verdammte Spielerei", presents The Long Parade. 

The Long Parade is a music-based durational performance that is inspired by the brutal history of the Belgian coast, memory and forgetting, and the children’s game "Telephone". Over the course of the summer, the Flemish fanfare band "Die Verdammte Spielerei" will be marching from the French-Belgian border in De Panne to the Belgian-Dutch border of Knokke, performing a new composition by Ari Benjamin Meyers over ten musical parades. For each performance, they are joined by a different local group of musicians that have made their own adaptations of the piece and, in a ritualized manner, will pass the music — and a specially commissioned flag — from one municipality to the next. This performance, in essence an evolving, moving rehearsal, continues over the coming months, undergoing further mutations until the work reaches its finale in Knokke-Heist in October.

With The Long Parade Meyers unites the identities and histories of the Belgian coastal municipalities in one new composition that gets adapted by all, celebrating collaboration and recognizing the individuality of each place, while at the same time highlighting the fog of memory as it pertains to the past – both recent and more distant.