The annual Moussem Cities festival focuses on a different metropolis from the Middle East or North Africa. Artists from the region and diaspora offer a look at their city and their work. Following editions around Beirut, Casablanca, Damascus and Algiers, this time Dakar is in the spotlight. The capital of Senegal, is considered the economic, political and cultural hub of West Africa, and has a vibrant cultural life. For the fifth time in a row, Kaaitheater partners with Moussem Cities. One of the highlights of the festival will be the performance Somewhere at the Beginning by Mikaël Serre & Germaine Acogny - one of the founders of contemporary African dance.

What impact will far-reaching digitisation have on our lives? In what ways does it change the way we think, feel, speak or love? Meet Bartlebabe, creature of Anna Franziska Jäger and Nathan Ooms, figure between human and algorithm. She unleashes a mass of online content on the analogue reality of the theatre, until it becomes so distorted that it takes on a monstrous face

What does it do to someone to grow up without a warm and safe nest? For months, Kyoko Scholiers immersed herself in the world of youth care: she interviewed juvenile judges, foster families, child psychiatrists, educators, children and their parents... Based on all these experiences, she wrote the fictional play BOY, with a soundscape sung live by Opera Ballet Flanders' children's choir. Last season, BOY was already on stage at Kaaitheater, and now returns due to great demand!

The young writer Édouard Louis is the greatest literary sensation in France since Michel Houellebecq. Ivo van Hove adapted his novel Who killed my father into a monologue, especially for Hans Kesting. It is a gripping story about a father who at fifty is a physical and mental wreck from working in the heavy industry of northern France. Édouard Louis also writes about how, as a young gay man, he was damned to be an outcast by his own working-class family. A bold and brilliant text.

Through dance, stories and the projection of photos and film, the Senegalese dancer and choreographer Germaine Acogny evokes both the history of her family and that of West Africa in this committed autobiographical solo. The performancequestions the place of women, the friction between tradition and emancipation and how identity is more of a path than an end point.

Whether you want to call Magical and Elastic a musical, deconstructed musical or an anti-musical doesn't really matter. Music, choreography, images and language are dependent on each other. This performance is a space where you see to listen and listen to see. Expect a magical performance where a narrative emerges from an image, a choreography is created thanks to the music, and the music starts from the words…

How do you translate the intensity, complexity and physicality of a piece of music into dance? For her new creation Duet for Two String Trios, Claire Croizé teams up with the Goeyvaerts String Trio, looking for answers to these questions through two string trios by the contemporary composer Charles Wuorinen. Dancers Emmi Väisänen and Jason Respilieux offer their bodies as a counterweight to this auditory onslaught. Music and dance circle each other in a play that is as dynamic and changeable as the string trios themselves: never a piece-by-piece translation, always a dialogue.

Imagine a tower of countless lamps and light sources. It comes to life buzzing, creaking and crackling to the rhythm of switching sounds. Named after the light designer Bruno Pocheron, BRUNO brings together series of dances oscillating between figuration and abstraction with three dancers trying on their movements as if they were clothes: every touch, every gesture, however fugitive, forever printed. 

bodies of knowledge (BOK) considers the city as a rich source of valuable knowledge. Every passer- by could teach you something from their own background and life-experiences. BOK seeks to share this invisibilized or suppressed knowledge through oral transmission, that potentially could give rise to a socially more just society. The Big BOK Multiplication tells the story of one and a half year of BOK in Brussels. It's the gathering of a learning community, and an encounter with a living corpus of non-dominant knowledge. Feel welcome to join and learn along.

In Operette, Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz presents the history of the 20th century as a series of costume changes. As a contrast, he uses the human being who wants to withdraw from this process in order to be able to be 'naked’. Tibaldus is now staging their third Gombrowicz: a performance that philosophises lightly about the cogwheel of history, with the passion and holy stupidity of an operetta.