WORKING TITLE FESTIVAL — Kasper Vandenberghe climbs on a scaffolding clad in a protective suit and then drops down like a rock. It is calculated recklessness. It is a poetic search for how vulnerable we can still allow ourselves to be and how we can understand vulnerability as a force. It is dancing on the loose rope between two deeply human desires: the desire for balance versus a bottomless leap into the unknown.

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 the performance Crazy But True, children between the ages of eight and eleven form a panel of experts. A text is whispered to them via headsets. They repeat what they hear, and thus present a growing list of extraordinary facts.

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.

‘Food for thought’, that is The Discreet Charm of Marxism. Marxist texts on the class struggle and revolution are staged as a six-course meal. In the meantime real food and drink are served, as ‘books’. No one will go hungry!

Led by the director and artist Ann Van de Vyvere (Firma Irma), a group of
‘observers’ has been studying reality in all its forms. Together, they bring surrealism to reality. How can we be sure of what we know? How do we measure what is normal and what is not? Hocus Focus explores the boundary
between the enthralling reality and real science.

Utopia::47 is a musical Passion in two parts. The point of departure of the first part is the sacred music composed by Heinrich Schütz during the Thirty Years War. The second part leads us to 2047, the final year of a future Thirty Year global conflict. Music and direction by Eric Sleichim.