KUNSTENFESTIVALDESARTS 08 - Over the last ten years Thomas Hauert has, both at home and abroad, shown himself to be a choreographer with a voice of his own. His latest piece, Accords, is an abstract choreographic composition that one experiences like a piece of music. The dancers physically transpose, amplify or distort the dynamics, harmony, melody and counterpoint in their bodies.

Four ‘identical’ female dancers hang like marionettes in a huge ‘machine’. Together with them performance artist Kris Verdonck generated a passage of choreography: a solo, a duet, a trio and a pas de quatre. They sought the greatest possible freedom from the machine, but sooner or later it sent them in the direction it decided upon.

The Swedish artist and composer Carl Michael von Hausswolff, who participated in Documenta in 1997, has written and staged a play about six ‘classic’ methods of torture that use water, light, sound, heat, etc. In Death is Certain, the Berlin performance artist Eva Meyer-Keller is a perfidious kitchen queen who puts vegetables to death. They are throttled, shot, drowned, poisoned and so on.

The Porcelain Project, Grace Ellen Barkey’s new creation, is based on a fascination with the fragility and transparency of porcelain and shows us a world in which dancers and porcelain move together. The setting for the performance is composed of hundreds of porcelain objects created by Lot Lemm. Grace Ellen Barkey brings them to life, together with the dancers, in an erotic world.

Thirty years of Kaaitheater leaves its mark on a human life. The Swiss collective PAK has developed a method by which you can determine whether theatre, or Kaaitheater, is good for your health. In six training sessions you can test your physical, mental, emotional, verbal, social and spiritual aptitude.

In recent years, Abattoir Fermé has become one of  Flanders’ leading companies. In Moe maar op en dolend the spectator is locked into a small anteroom of the subconscious where there is no logic and dreams turn into dark nightmares. De Morgen newspaper described it as ‘Twin Peaks served neat’.