Lie back and close your eyes. While enjoying a hand massage secluded from the outside world, close neighbours and complete strangers divulge their most intimate secrets. This travelling audio installation reveals compelling and moving new portraits from Molenbeek in Brussels to Slotermeer in Amsterdam. Learn how the universal search for happiness and security can be hampered by relentless reality.

In 1993 Jolente De Keersmaeker and Damiaan De Schrijver, together with Julien Schoenaerts, created Gewoon Ingewikkeld, based on Einfach Kompliziert by Thomas Bernhard. It was inevitable that Bernhard would continue to be one of STAN’s fellow travellers. Now the theatre company presents three Bernhard adaptations as a trilogy: a true Bernhard marathon that is around six hours long.

Elfriede Jelinek wrote Die Schutzbefohlenen in 2013 as a reaction to the increasingly desperate refugee problem in Europe. Her text has proved to be more than prophetic: all the images that are now burnt into our memories she minutely calls to life years before the actual events. Guy Cassiers matches Jelinek’s torrent of words with images and with four dancers in a choreography by Maud Le Pladec.

A philanthropist – one who still genuinely believes in progress – builds a ship. However much like a fable it may seem, Pieter De Buysser’s planetarium production was inspired by contemporary socio-political realities. Take a chance on this border exploration for nationalists, homeland research for cosmopolitans, and cosmology of a new worldview.

In Cinema Dialogue, Monika Gintersdorfer and Knut Klaßen critically examine the United Nations’ ostensibly apolitical Millennium Development Goals. They juxtapose the universalism of the UN programme with the local reality of urban development in Kinshasa between 2000 and the present day.

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.

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.

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!

Choreographers Felix Mathias Ott and Bahar Temiz are fascinated by a movement language that shifts between intimacy and sheer violence. How does a performance creates its own stage, its own beginning, its own onlookers on the verge between violence and tenderness

In this performance/cookery workshop, Feiko Beckers teaches you some cooking techniques using faulty instructions and impractical utensils. You can be sure that the result will be inedible, but in Feiko Beckers’ world, failure is always a joy!