Piñata Cake, 2025
An unusual, visual, musical and physical performance inspired by circus, Piñata Cake plays with our expectations and our thirst for astonishment, by diverting the revealing effect used in car shows to unveil a new model using fabric.
At first invisible, the scenography and protagonists gradually reveal themselves in ways that are sometimes intimate, spectacular, or absurd.
Who operates in this theatrical space? Who are the real actors in this hallucinatory landscape? Does it even matter to define them?
Like a dance between the hidden and the revealed, they engage in revealing attempts through entresorts. They converse, build pyramids, sing, and sometimes fall silent, leading the audience into a fantastical and reflective landscape.
In a playful and anarchic manner, the performers on stage explore questions related to our social relationships, our constructions, and what we choose to let appear in society.
In a succession of visual revelations, the performers will be led through spectacular fragments to show us all sorts of things in a surprise effect. This new show will revolve around very marked rhythm changes or caesuras, performed with great freedom of tone so that astonishment is perpetually present. Its dramaturgy should also question our relationship to one-upmanship, change, novelty and consumption.
Piñata Cake premiered from March 4 till 8, 2025 in Atelier 210 (Brussels, BE).
Previously, Gaël Santisteva directed TALK SHOW (2017) and Garcimore est mort (2021). In July 2023, he co-created Voie, Voix, Vois with Antoine Leroy and Saaber Bachir. In 2026, he will develop the research project Smoothie Songs.
Piñata Cake - A project by Gaël Santisteva (65', 2025)
Creation and performance: Gaël Santisteva, Micha Goldberg, Jonas Chéreau, Vivi Focquet, Maya Dhondt
Artistic advices: Lara Barsacq
Dramaturgical advices: Sarah Vanhee
Sound and musical composition: Maya Dhondt
Light design: Emma Laroche
Costumes design: Sofie Durnez
Sound: Fred Miclet, Lucie Bourdon
Stage design: Sofie Durnez, Gaël Santisteva
Administration & production: Mélanie Jourdan, Myriam Chekhemani (La chouette diffusion)
Communication & distribution: Quentin Legrand (Rue Branly)
Production: Gilbert & Stock
Coproduction: Atelier 210, Charleroi danse - Centre chorégraphique de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, Théâtre national Wallonie-Bruxelles, UP - Circus & Performing Arts
Residencies: Charleroi danse, Grand Studio, Kunstenwerkplaats, Studio Thor, Arts Center Buda, Latitude 50 – Pôle des arts du cirque et de la rue
With the support of Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles
Piñata Cake keeps the audience in suspense with promises it deliberately fails to deliver on. Gaël Santisteva does not show spectacle, but our hunger for it, and how much we rely on the expectation of a revelation that may never come. (…) Piñata Cake is a reflection on our constant urge for something new, for the big reveal. The performance also rattles the high expectations that surround art as a “message” today. Santisteva sabotages that expectation machine, so that we realise that we always want to see something “resolved” immediately and how badly we cope when that doesn't happen. (…) We live in a time of reveals, unboxing and instant gratification, of videos that always have to show ‘something’. Santisteva and his companions turn that dominant logic on its head. They show an empty piñata that, contrary to expectations, contains no sweets. The whole thing is almost spectacle, almost emotion, almost magic. But it is precisely in that “almost” that they show how dependent we have become on that promise itself.
Jasper Delva, pzazz Theater, 26.11.25
