Ictus is a contemporary music ensemble from Brussels, working in the buildings of the dance company Rosas. The ensemble exists for five years and inclines to accept the critical attitude towards the so-called contemporary music, that is typical for its generation: sympathy for all that is new and refusal of the avant-garde for avant-garde's sake only; links with other media (film, jazz, theatre) and suspicion to syncretism; seriousness and irony; etcetera.
The programmes of Ictus on purpose cover a very large stylistic perspective. To confront itself with this eclecticism and to challenge itself in every concert, to make every concert a structured moment in time, Ictus tends to thematical concerts (transcription, the scattered time, the nocturnal, irony, music and silent movies,...) and portrait concerts (Magnus Lindberg, Emmanuel Nunes, Jonathan Harvey, Franco Donatoni, Steve Reich, Toshio Hosokawa...
As the privileged partner of choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Ictus participated in four dance productions with Rosas. In collaboration with Pierre Droulers and Jim Clayburgh, Ictus staged Ligeti's music theatre pieces "Aventures - Nouvelles Aventures" in a production of La Monnaie/De Munt.
Every year, Ictus presents - in collaboration with the Philharmonic Society of Brussels and the Kaaitheater - a series of six to ten concerts in Brussels that are well received by the public. In only a few years, Ictus also succeeded in getting a strong foothold in the international scene. Ictus appeared or soon will appear in the Ars Musica festival in Brussels, in Vienna and Tokyo, at the Ircam in Paris, in the Musica festival in Strasbourg, in Octobre en Normandie in Rouen, in the Festival für Zeitgenossige Musik in Donaueschingen, in the festival of Saintes and Helsinki, at Royaumont, in the Wittener Musiktage, in the Zeitfluss festival in Salzburg, in the Festival d'Automne in Paris, in the Berliner Festwoche,...
Recently Ictus created or will create new works by Magnus Lindberg, Jonathan Harvey, Luc Brewaeys, Philippe Boesmans, Brice Pauset, Toshio Hosokawa, Rebecca Saunders, James Wood, Keiko Harada, Fabrizio Cassol, Unsuk Chin, Johannes Schöllhorn and Fausto Romitelli.