Artists

Piano Recital 'When AI kills Faust, the Vesalian Idea of Staged Mortality'

Piano: Elke Robersscheuten - Recitation: Theo Dirix

In continuity with Session IV – Theatrum Anatomicum, where Vesalius and Goethe already met on a theatrical stage, this recital presents an excerpt from When AI Kills Faust, inspired by Goethe’s masterpiece.
This performance, presented last year in a converted train theatre in Athens, is a fictional follow-up, illuminated by piano works by P. Swerts, Ph. Glass, E. Bloch, and J. S. Bach.
Two literary sources justify the theatrical argument, transforming this abstract into a praefatio ad lectorem.
The discovery that the Goldener Adler hotel in Innsbruck, where Goethe stayed on a few occasions, may also have accommodated Andreas Vesalius during the passage of Charles V in the early 1550s, functions as a validation. The documented presence of Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, minister to Emperor Charles V, combined with the logic of proximity within the imperial suite and the later presence of Goethe, allows these figures to defy their mortality by sharing, through history, the same space.
The second source goes back to the first edition of Vesalius Continuum in Athens, even before the search for the grave of Vesalius in Zakynthos. From the very beginning, it was clear that the fascination with Vesalius was also inspired by music and theatre. The program in the Dutch Institute in April 2012 stated explicitly that Jan Steven van Calcar’s images do not merely express Vesalius ’view of the human body, but stage its finitude. Set within landscapes suggesting a Greco-Roman past and later contemporary achievements, as well as a destination marked by transcendence, Vesalius ’work presents life and death as inseparable. Later filmic and ballet reflections, from Peter Greenaway and Peter Maxwell Davies, only made explicit what Vesalius already implied: decay and destruction are inseparable from creation. When AI Kills Faust defends nothing but the same thesis: any attempt to abolish death, whether through artificial intelligence or trans- or posthumanist fantasies, does not lead beyond the human; it simply negates it.

Biography

Belgian/Flemish pianist Elke Robersscheuten was born in Antwerp and began her studies in piano, harpsichord, and church organ at the Music Academy of Ekeren, continuing at the Royal Music Academy of Antwerp and the Lemmens Institute in Louvain. Since moving to Greece in 2005, she has taught piano at the Kodály Conservatory in Athens. She also performs as a soloist and chamber musician, frequently collaborating with vocal ensembles and orchestras such as Armonia Atenea, the ERT Choir, and in a variety of chamber music settings.

Theo Dirix is a Flemish author, known mainly for his writings on literature and Andreas Vesalius, who now specialises in cross-disciplinary lecture-performances that merge text, music, and visual elements.After a nomadic diplomatic life, he has returned to his first love: theatre. His recent works, A Necromantic Night, Vesalian Landscapes, and When AI Kills Faust, combine spoken word and live music to offer a sharp, poetic reflection on contemporary culture.