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.

In 2009, Sarma, the Brussels centre for criticism, research, dramaturgy and creation, will be compiling a collection of writings by the theatre and dance critic Pieter T’Jonck. An initial selection will be published online in April and on that occasion Sarma will be organising a lecture demonstration in which T’Jonck both explains and stages his thoughts on theatricality.

Press is based on childlike fantasies about monsters: how in the darkness and shadows objects or body parts can assume monstrous shapes, become unrecognisable and frighten us. The French choreographer and dancer Pierre Rigal finds himself in a sort of box: a small, empty space which changes mechanically and to which the body has to adapt. The result is an absurd performance that is both frightening and amusing.

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!

On the exact day of the centenary of publication of the Futurist Manifesto in Le Figaro, the director and multimedia artist Claudio Sinatti and the composer Black Fanfare/Demetrio Castellucci are presenting a project based on the poetics of Futurism to create something entirely new. The live-media performance will use present-day idioms and media to look at the hundred-year-old aesthetics of Futurism.

‘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.

Melting glaciers, burning forests, cities under water, screens and cameras spying on us, weapons of mass destruction... End starts out from the images the media project onto our retinas. The performance artist Kris Verdonck shows the possible final stages of a human society in ten scenes that are linked by a monologue by a speaking character (Johan Leysen).

In The Making of Doubt, the Scottish choreographer Colette Sadler puts four dancers and several puppets and prostheses on stage. She uses them to play a clever and witty game with reality, fiction and manipulation. How much authenticity do we need to believe in the fake? ‘The physical transformation of dancers by means of their costumes raises associations with the Triadisches Ballett by the Bauhaus exponent Oskar Schlemmer’ (8Weekly.nl).

In you are here the theatre is seen as an information network in which objects and technology play an active, almost human, role. The theatre is an archive in which information is stored, ordered, retrieved and passed on. You, the spectator, follow a route that keeps within the theatre’s codes and systems.

Waste and excess seem to be fundamental to modern man’s definition of himself. Can we turn our urge to waste in a more immaterial direction? And can art, as a form of symbolic waste, play a part in this?