oester is a laboratory for performative arts and a music-based, anti-disciplinary platform for encounters across sound, performance and visual arts. It researches and reimagines the opera and music-theatre stage as a transdisciplinary playground, dismantling inherited conventions to test their relevance today. oester opens spaces of friction and dialogue where forms meet, shift and contaminate. The work invites new ways of listening, seeing and experiencing, treating sound as architecture as much as music, and spectatorship as a live, shared terrain.
oester is stage director and curator Aïda Gabriëls & dramaturge Tessa Vannieuwenhuyze
Soldering together contemporary and classical music, visual arts, movement, literature and fashion, Aïda Gabriëls navigates the performing arts as a space of listening, confrontation and encounter. Through oester, the collective she founded, she seeks frictions between disciplines and genres to open new ways of seeing and hearing. Early works include Medeamaterial (2017), I am the enemy you killed, my friend (2018), Vacuum (2020) and Dance of the Seven Veils (2021), each testing how image, sound and bodies co-compose meaning. With The Wild Stage (2022) she explored escape and collectivity across pop, baroque and electronica. In 2024 she developed the museum-based projects Passages and Ethereal Realms – all fiction is metaphor, a white-cube/nightclub encounter. Earlier this year, Polyphonies - a spatial choral experiment, deconstructing polyphony - premiered at Bozar. She is currently creating SEISMIC, a concert unframed, where sound behaves like matter under pressure. Her practice probes how histories, bodies and voices resonate in the present, shaping encounters that are as sensorial as they are critical. Aïda is currently a curator at Gent Festival and artistic coordinator with Music Theatre Now.
Tessa Vannieuwenhuyze is a dramaturge and scholar focused on how music artists appear theatrically within today’s platformed media ecologies. She recently completed her PhD on performance, mediation and the visibility of musical labour in the age of social media. At oester, she translates this research into dramaturgical practice, testing what opera and music theatre can be when circulation, attention and liveness collide. Tessa holds a Master’s in Art History, Musicology and Theatre Studies (UGent) and an advanced Master’s in Literature (KU Leuven). Beyond oester, she lends her dramaturgical eye and writing to various artistic projects and platforms, connecting theoretical inquiry to concrete artistic processes and audience experience.
© Anton Coene
get in touch
Aïda Gabriëls (artistic director)
Tessa Vannieuwenhuyze (dramaturge — researcher)
Maja Lozic (Muziektheater Transparant — diffusion)
artist-in-residence at
Ancienne Belgique (Brussels), Muziektheater Transparant (Antwerp), Motel Mozaïque (Rotterdam), KMSKA (Antwerp), Concertgebouw (Bruges) & Needcompany (Brussels)
associated artist at
Music Theatre NOW
board of members
Bert Van der Auwera, Katrin Swartenbroux, Pieter D’Hooghe, Veerle Mans & Ines Adam
official information
oester vzw
Sint-Janvest 1, bus 301
9000 Gent — BELGIUM
TAV BE 0746.757.468