Jérôme Bel is a choreographer and dancer, but has for a long time also been a spectator. In Un spectateur he emerges as a superb storyteller and guides us through the visual experiences that taught him the performing arts ‘basics’ and which most influenced him as a spectator.

From January to March 2009, 16 evenings of discussion are being organised in order to reflect, together with as many Brussels people and Brussels-lovers as possible, on the challenges facing the Brussels region. On 25 April the main ideas that have emerged from these debates will be put to political figures at the Kaaitheater. This grand finale will be an encounter between city-dwellers, the organisers and experts of the Citizens Forum, journalists and politicians.

Merlin Spie is a visual artist: she does sculptures and drawings, and also installations and performances of which she herself forms a part. Her latest project, Le silence des danses, comprises three performances in three different places in the Kaaistudios.

In 2003 the Iranian jurist Shirin Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Prize for her struggle for the rights of women and children in Iran. She has been invited by MO* and several cultural partners to give a talk at the Kaaitheater.

The Swiss duo comprising Dominik Scherrer and Christoph Hefti works in the fields of music, film and fashion (Christoph is a member of Dries Van Noten’s creative team). They together make up the art-pop combo Taxi Val Mentek. They perform a frivolous electro-vaudeville concert, halfway between cabaret and video art.

The American feminist and writer Valerie Solanas (1936-1988) is best known for having shot Andy Warhol in 1968 (he survived). One might consider her SCUM Manifesto as a radical-feminist rant, but she herself described it as ‘a literary device’. ‘It’s all fresh and juicy, sexy and funny,’ say the choreographer and theatre-maker Adrienne Altenhaus and the musician and performance artist Anat Ben-David (of Chicks on Speed). They are having a ball with it, and if you want a piece, come and tear off a piece!

The artistic duo of Ivo Provoost and Simona Denicolai attacks the petrified codes of daily life with gentle subversion, the excitement of activism, mature scepticism and fun. Danai Anesiadou presents her performance One measures a circle, beginning anywhere, a mixture of theatre, autobiography, black magic and avant-garde film.

On 20th February 1909, the first Futurist Manifesto, by Marinetti, appeared on the front page of Le Figaro. It was the start of a long series of 20th-century avant-gardes. Exactly one hundred years later, the demands and expectations of the time are being reviewed and commemorated. After a reading of the manifesto performed by Sara De Roo and clarification by the Marinetti expert Sascha Bru (Ghent University), the writer Jeroen Olyslaeghers, artist Danny De Vos and poet Dirk van Bastelaere will respond to several key concepts in this hundred-year-old document.

What is our current attitude towards the future and what effect does this have on contemporary performance and media art? Diggin’ the Future debates and presents such artistic practices as internet activism, network art, retro-futurism, digital performances, immersive technologies and virtual worlds such as Second Life. China experts will talk about ‘instant future’, a term for a cultural context where present and future coincide.

‘Is it possible to have a robot that is able to say or act lines from Beckett?’ This question is the basis for Actor # 1 by the artist and theatre-maker Kris Verdonck. You will have the chance to look at his research process. Writing by Beckett will be ‘brought to life’ by means of interactive media (Felix Luque) and a voice. We shall hear ‘live’ reactions to this from the geneticist Jean Jacques Cassiman, the neurosurgeon Dirk de Ridder and the philosopher and mathematician Jean Paul Van Bendegem.

Stelarc is an Australian performance artist. The basic principle of his ideas is that the body is an obsolete, outdated machine. He regards the protheses, robots or interventions he designs as an extension of the bodily machine’s capacity. In his lecture-demonstration, he examines three of his works of art.