On a stage covered with a thick layer of earth and bathed in light stand fourteen dancers – all different in age and dance background. Movements flow from one body to the next, gradually building to a wild climax. The result is a tactile experience that shares loneliness with fiction: how is it that you can be alone even when you’re in a group?

Does gender have a voice, does skin have a race? Using drag, vogueing, striptease, YouTube tutorials as well as the triadic ballet by Oskar Schlemmer, seven bodies and many more objects try out new constellations, like surrealist ready-mades. With a great sense of irony, Escape Act presents hyper-stereotyped gender identities, only to deconstruct them completely.

Symphony of Expectation combines two iconic, 20^th-century compositions: Sinfonia by Luciano Berio and Erwartung by Arnold Schönberg. One second of the maximal spiritual excitement of a female main character explodes into an intense theatrical experience.

For centuries, dancers have been counting their steps to 4, 6 or 8. But what if dancers were to count to infinity? Boris Charmatz: ‘I have always hated counting while dancing. In this piece, we count, speak and sing not only so that we can dance, but first and foremost, so that our minds can wander even more.’ In a world that is being increasingly enslaved by algorithms, Charmatz offers a moment of infinity.

For this adaptation of Moby Dick, Gorges Ocloo called on Ben Okri, who adapted the novel into a magic-realist story about the gulf between high and low, rich and poor. Josse De Pauw and the renowned American mezzo-soprano Raehann Bryce-Davis take to the stage. Together, they perform an energized and jazzy opera about the need for rapprochement in an increasingly polarized society.

Rain (2001) is one of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s most characteristic performances, set to Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. Seven women and three men allow themselves to be propelled by an unstoppable joined energy. They are connected by a lively network of breathing and speed, as well as the special comradery that forms when you are beyond fatigue. In 2016, Rain was reprised with a new cast, premièring at the Royal Circus.

Daniel Linehan creates a choreography in which the lighting, the scenography, the costumes, the movement, and the music each dominate the stage in turn, and then fade to make space for the others. This constant cycle of emergence and disappearance creates an interplay in which unnoticed elements suddenly demand your attention, eliciting unsuspected moments of wonder.