oester is a laboratory for performative arts and a music-driven, anti-disciplinary platform where sound, performance and visual art intersect. It approaches opera and music theatre as unstable terrains, dismantling inherited conventions to reconsider what the stage can mean today.

The platform cultivates spaces of friction and encounter where disciplines overlap and transform one another. Sound is treated as architecture as much as music, while spectatorship becomes a shared and shifting field rather than a fixed point of view.

oester is led by stage director and curator Aïda Gabriëls and dramaturge Tessa Vannieuwenhuyze.

Aïda Gabriëls is a stage director and curator whose work examines how voices, bodies and histories resonate in the present, producing encounters that are as sensorial as they are critical. Soldering together contemporary and classical music, visual art, movement, literature and fashion, she works at the intersection of listening and space.

Early works include Medeamaterial (2017), I Am the Enemy You Killed, My Friend (2018), Vacuum (2020) and Dance of the Seven Veils (2021). With The Wild Stage (2022) she explored collectivity across pop, baroque and electronica. In 2024 she created the museum projects Passages and Ethereal Realms – all fiction is metaphor, a white-cube/nightclub encounter.

Recent works include Polyphonies (Bozar, 2025), a spatial choral experiment deconstructing polyphony, and SEISMIC (Botanique, 2025), a concert unframed in which sound behaves like matter under pressure. Upcoming is EAT ME, a baroque opera-installation on appetite and excess, commissioned by Concertgebouw Brugge and premiering in spring 2026. In 2027 Gabriëls will make her debut at La Monnaie / De Munt with the newly written opera Burmese Days. She is co-artistic director of Muziektheater Transparant, curator at Gent Festival van Vlaanderen, and artistic coordinator for Music Theatre Now.

Tessa Vannieuwenhuyze is a dramaturge and scholar researching how music artists appear theatrically within today’s platformed media ecologies. She recently completed a PhD on performance, mediation and the visibility of musical labour in the age of social media. At oester she brings this research into dramaturgical practice, exploring how opera and music theatre operate within contemporary circuits of circulation, attention and liveness.

She holds a Master’s in Art History, Musicology and Theatre Studies (UGent) and an advanced Master’s in Literature (KU Leuven). Alongside oester she collaborates on various artistic projects and platforms, connecting theoretical inquiry with artistic process and audience experience.

press

De Morgen — Rock-’n-roll in de opera: Aïda Gabriëls is nu al een grande dame in de muziek-, opera- en theaterwereld

Klara — De Liefhebber

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), KMSKA (Antwerp), Concertgebouw (Bruges) & Needcompany (Brussels)

board of members

Bert Van der Auwera, Katrin Swartenbroux & Pieter D’Hooghe

official information

oester vzw

Sint-Janvest 1, bus 301

9000 Gent — BELGIUM

TAV BE 0746.757.468