Sammy Van den Heuvel — scenography

Each space grows within a specific frame that is formed through conversations; with the director, with the choreographer, with the text, the music, the material, with the dramaturg, with the production team, with the artists and builders in the workshops, with the stage technicians. Ultimately, the built space engages in a conversation with the performers, and, through them, in a conversation with the audience.
Wozzeck
Seraphim
No yogurt for the dead
Tipping point
Angel's bone
Le nozze di Figaro
The man who fell from the sky
A safe space for male bodies
Szenen aus Goethes Faust
The world’s wife
Vanishing point
Die Vorüberlaufenden
The future is not what it used to be
Solitary dialogues
Solitude
Each time we fall a city rises
Quartett
A requiem for lost things
Als niemand me ziet
Totentanz
#truth: ein sokratischer Abend
Ich rufe meine Brüder
3000 Euro
Ich bin wie ihr, ich liebe Äpfel


sammyvandenheuvel@gmail.com

Wozzeck

Alban Berg’s opera is based on an unfinished play by Georg Büchner. In his composition, Berg gave an unstoppable momentum to the fragmentary scenes. Johan Simons takes us inside the mind of a man who is losing his grip on reality, or rather, a man who finds himself at the mercy of ruthless, mad world.

The space is the inside of Wozzeck's head: his canvas, an off-kilter and eerie playground over which he has no control. Moving shadows make one question the static nature of the space. 

musical direction
Alejo Pérez
direction
Johan Simons 

dramaturgyMaarten Boussery and Koen Tachelet

scenography Sammy Van den Heuvel

costume design    Greta Goiris and Flóra Kruppa

light design Friedrich Rom

/Opera Ballet Vlaanderen 2025

Seraphim

Together with French mezzo Lucile Richardot, B’Rock’s Vocal Consort and chamber musicians honor female composers from the early Middle Ages to the present day.

As the music resounds an almost immaterial column dances to the changing airflows in the concert hall, evoking a mystical presence that binds the many-facetted musical landscape. 

The concert was staged in De Bijloke Ghent and the Philharmonie Essen.

musical direction       Andreas Küppers

dramaturgyAlbert Edelman

staging, scenography and light design  Sammy Van den Heuvel

/B’Rock 2025

No yogurt for the dead

During his final days in hospice, Rogério Rodrigues, a respected Portuguese journalist, started taking notes to write his final article. He died before he could finish it. His notebook went to his son, Tiago. When he opened it, all he saw were lines and scribbles. Mixing memories, songs and fragments of his father’s writings, the son aims to imagine the unwritten pages of his father's last work, a small victory over death. 

A testimony to absence, the floor of the hospital room where Rogério dies again and again, has grown into a mountainous landscape, a portal to another world.  


text and directionTiago Rodrigues 

dramaturgyKaatje De Geest

scenographySammy Van den Heuvel

costume designIlse Vandenbussche

light designDennis Diels

original music and arrangements Hélder Gonçalves

/NTGent 2025

Tipping point

Made entirely out of steel, this mysterious object it is not quite a shipwreck washed ashore or the ruins of some kind of military devide in the desert, but what it does is connect. Weighing more than a ton, it demands the atmost concentration and collaboration from the performers to balance it and create space for solos and partnerwork.   


concept and choreography    Pia Meuthen

dramaturgical adviceCamille Paycha, Julian Vogel, Guido Janssen

scenographySammy Van den Heuvel

costume designSanne Reichert

light designBart Verzellenberg

music Strijbos & van Rijswijk and Davide Bellotta

/Panama Pictures 2023

Angel’s bone

Two angels land battered and bruised in a married couple's garden. They are taken in by the couple but instead of nursing them back to health, the couple clips their wings and uses their heavenly powers to enrich themselves under the guise of charity. 

Composer Du Yun and librettist Royce Vavrek address the dark abyss of modern slavery and human trafficking.


musical directionJohannes Witt 

directionJorinde Keesmaat 

choreography Pascal Merighi

dramaturgyLalina Goddard

scenography and costume designSammy Van den Heuvel

video and light designFrouke ten Velden

/Oper Wuppertal /Muziekgebouw aan het IJ 2023

Le nozze di Figaro

What starts as a seemingly simple desire — Susanna and Figaro want to get married— quickly degenerates into a comedy of intrigue. This opera is the first of three collaborations between composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte.

The ideas of the Enlightenment are omnipresent in this work. These are characters who want to build the world anew. And to do that the old must be deconstructed. First the castle is flattened and neatly laid out on the floor, then the architectural drawings that preceded the castle are washed away, and finally the floor itself is lifted to uncover the garden, nature as its most comfortable. 


musical directionMarie Jacquot 

directionTom Goossens

dramaturgyLalina Goddard and Tom Swaak

scenographySammy Van den Heuvel

costume design    Dotje Demuynck

light designLuc Schaltin

/Opera Ballet Vlaanderen 2023

The man who fell from the sky

Panama Pictures intertwines dance, aerial and floor acrobatics, and live music to capture the collective sense of directionlessness and dislocation that marks our times. 

A series of poetic images, in which the strength and vulnerability of the human body are paramount, show the human being who, without a foothold or compass, must relate to an environment that is subject to change. 


concept and choreography    Pia Meuthen

dramaturgical adviceJulian Vogel, Guido Janssen

scenographySammy Van den Heuvel

costume designSanne Reichert

light designBart Verzellenberg

musicStrijbos & van Rijswijk and Davide Bellotta

/Panama Pictures 2022

A safe space for male bodies

The possibility of Europe becoming a theater of war has recently become more real than we ever feared — and with it the prospect of being drafted. In this performance we focused on those who would be mobilized in wartime, namely young males fit for military service.

In the spaces of Neue Galerie Graz’s BRUSEUM, we collaborated with a group of men who have been trained in the Austrian military service, the Bundesheer. Creating a “safe space” in precarious times, we invited the audience to take a closer look at the shifting perception of the male, potentially militarized body in the context of an approaching war.

The performance challenged the images of heroism and masculinity associated with the military and explored the incomprehensible contradictions of young male bodies that might be trained, armed, and finally destroyed in the name of peace.


concept and directionGiacomo Veronesi 

scenography and costume designSammy Van den Heuvel

video designAnita Kremm

/Steirischer Herbst 2022

Szenen aus Goethes Faust

Faust is a disillusioned scholar, fruitlessly searching for the deepest truth. In exchange for his soul, the devil promises him a life of pleasure, culminating in one moment of perfect happiness. What follows is a rollercoaster of striving, falling, and picking himself up again, driven by a desire for love and a relentless drive for progress.

In the moment of his death he outwits the devil, is forgiven and allowed to enter heaven. It is the ambiguity of striving that saves Faust. For despite negative consequences, ever striving also connects us in the search for meaning in life. Judging someone else for their desires is hypocritical, because in reality we all cherish our desires. We are all Faust.

Composer Robert Schumann leafed through Goethe's masterpiece and captured its essence in seven iconic scenes, oscillating between opera and oratorio. Under an overwhelming video screen, the seemingly endless stage is populated by a community of singers: soloists, Collegium Vocale Gent and the Choir and Children's Choir of Opera Ballet Vlaanderen.


musical directionPhilippe Herreweeghe 

direction and video designJulian Rosefeldt

choreographyFemke Gyselinck 

dramaturgyKatherina Lindekens and Tobias Staab 

scenographySammy Van den Heuvel

costume design    Birgitt Killian

light designMatthias Singer

/Opera Ballet Vlaanderen and Philippe Herreweghe/Collegium Vocale 2022

The world’s wife

This chamber opera composed by Tom W. Green is based on a collection of poems by Carol Ann Duffy and reflects on collective, historical, and mythological stories, retold from a female perspective. One after the other, a variety of women, some fictional, some not, take the floor. Five performers embark on a journey towards the (re)discovery of a collective and individual female voice.

To the pulse of the characters, the stage morphs from a little house in the woods to a beehive to a dirt yard with scattered planters — one for each performer to nestle in. The planters become cocoons that burst open to give each performer her illuminated platform.


directionJorinde Keesmaat 

dramaturgyLalina Goddard 

scenographySammy Van den Heuvel

costume designSasja Strengholt

light designTim van ‘t Hof

kinetic typographyBureau Merkwaardig

/Ragazze Quartet 2022