When Vincent Dunoyer began to create performances himself it struck him that dance industry professionals would always ask him the same thing. ‘Can you send us a DVD of the performance?’ In DVD DVD he creates a montage of personal and professional memories, like a lecture interspersed with video and dance. Both intimate and universal!

A sudden and uannounced event can change the colour of whatever went before. unannounced – a performance for six dancers – plays with the way your focus shifts when a sudden apparition suddenly changes your perspective. The creators zoom in on the deep dark shades of the black box to look beyond the surface of the here and now. The anticipation of what is to come echoes the afterglow of the past.

Trajal Harrell explores a moment in dance history when female artists presented performances on the boundary between entertainment, erotic dancing, and early experiments in modern dance. CAEN AMOUR is structured as a hoochie coochie show. With a seductive performance, scantily dressed ‘hoochies’ lure you around to the backstage area, to reveal the festivities on the ‘coochie’ side.

With In Many Hands, McIntosh dives into a tactile and multi-sensory world. She invites you to test, touch, listen and smell. She turns her back on the stage and opts for a series of sensory ‘situations’ which give you free rein to experiment. Take your time to explore and follow your nose!

How should we deal with the universal human urge to be part of a greater whole? In a stylized, atomic universe, Frank&Robbert discover the laws of duality, beauty, and magnetism.

Laure Prouvost’s single sculpture piece Ho What A Cake is continuously displayed through the festival. The loaf of bread daubed with blue paint that was created during a performative dinner, and comes to life through light and sound.

You and a partner sit side by side in the reading room of Muntpunt. Via headphones and a notebook, a voice gives whispered instructions that guide you through a pile of books. A unique narrative thus unfolds for each duo. It is an intense and intimate hour-long experience – situated among studying students and reading library-users – that brings out the strange magic at the heart of reading.

Maarten Vanden Eynde and Alioum Moussa are building a two-part mobile structure, of which one side is the other’s opposite. During Performatik17 they set up shop at Place de la Monnaie, where you are invited to visit them – in pairs – for a discussion about dependence and independence.

In their performances, author and artist Romy Rüegger and electronic music performer Deena Abdelwahed reflect on ways of personal entanglement with the world and its politics, including the interpretation of history as part of the present.

Ivo Dimchev is one name that cannot be missed from the Performatik programme: the exuberant performer has never missed a single edition. This time he sets up his first long durational performance at ZSenne artlab. For six days, he explores seven of his favorite creative activities. Pay Ivo a visit and witness his fourteen-hours performance laboratory. 

In this lecture performance, Rabih Mroué and Hito Steyerl examine probability. Steyerl gets caught up in quantum superposition, while Mroué consults his father about mathematical calculations. They come across ‘zero probability’: a space in which everything is possible but nothing can be explained.