The TheaterFestival traditionally opens the performing arts season, but this year it will be accompanied by a series of safety measures. This edition of the TheaterFestival will take place in Brussels, with its hub based at Kaaitheater. Along with the festival, we are bringing artists and audiences back together in our auditorium. 

Gravity, inertia, resistance, momentum, action, and reaction. These are the five fundamental mechanical principles of movement we must control in order to walk and dance. Forces of Nature follows the movements of a complex organism that is constituted of five dancers, each with their own energy and ideas. From their negotiations and questions flows a score.

In 1981, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel performed their legendary charity concert in Central Park, New York: a musical feast of friendship and solidarity. the two singers now avoid one another as much as possible. More even: they had already split at the time of that concert. Simon, Garfunkel, My Sister and Me is the ultimate re-enactment of the concert, a show about rivalry in all its forms.

Tibaldus has dived into Madmen & Specialists, a text by the Nigerian Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka. While a son works with complete conviction for a fascist system, his father has lost all faith in every system. This eternal power struggle between belief systems that each claim the truth for themselves is the most confronting performance Tibaldus has ever produced.

Can duration in performances be a tool for resistance against the neatly packaged and overproduced things we are fed everywhere in our society, so the audience are pushed to invest their time—and themselves—in the work, instead of just experiencing something that is forced into an easy-to-digest format?

Hoewel steeds meer mensen het gevaar van klimaatverandering inzien, lijken we maar niet te slagen dit bewustzijn om te zetten in grootschalige politieke acties. Hoe kan dat?

Als onze fundering bestaat uit met elkaar spreken, naar elkaar luisteren en aanvaarden dat we het soms wel en soms niet met elkaar eens zijn, lukt het dan om op dat abstracte fundament een werkelijk, concreet bouwwerk te construeren, zoals een huis waar we ons beiden thuis voelen?

2. How to make room for more people to make decisions?