Every two years a new generation of dancers and choreographers graduates from the PARTS dance school in Brussels, which was founded and is headed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. One invariably sees these young artists appearing soon afterwards with fresh perspectives on dance and performance. The international tour of their graduation pieces always gives an exciting foretaste of what’s to come.

Working Title Platform#4 - The formula of Performance Kit is pretty clear; a performer enters the stage, performs a solo and gets challenged by questions through an audio score. Nevertheless the outcome is way more complex; it’s a show, a practice, an audio-guide, an analysis, it entails research and searches for hidden treasures at the same time.

Jolika Sudermann and Alma Söderberg noticed that when we speak to each other we are actually singing and dancing with each other. A Talk is a light but virtuoso game of word compositions and language improvisation, performed by a charming and refreshing female duo!

The Swedish-German performance artist Eva Meyer-Keller is obsessed with food. In Death is certain (in the Kaaistudio’s in 2007) she condemned a number of vegetables to death. Now she’s cooking up a series of disasters. She will be bringing them to you live, using soup, juice, sauce and other ingredients. How hungry does an earthquake make you?

Very occasionally, something makes your hair stand on end. Nick Steur’s FREEZE! is just such a performance: small in scale, big on ideas. Nick Steur creates a pile of natural stones. He doesn’t use any glue or trickery, just intense concentration and ‘a balance between my own willpower and that of the stone’.  FREEZE!, won the KBC Young Theatre Prize 2011 at Theater Aan Zee.

With a sharp instrument he cuts pieces out of the photos: glaciers, sea-beds, natural panoramas, flowers, plants, animals, all things that might be threatened with extinction or have already become extinct. The Italian artist Cristian Chironi dissects images and structures and creates new and contrasting relationships. He wants the viewer to have the same reaction as to a perfect masterpiece of art, because he wonders whether we aren’t all tourists looking at the Himalayas with a cheeseburger in our hands.

An American of Korean origin, Young Jean Lee develops theatre that destabilises cultural representations of identity and refers us back to our own stereotypes. This time she tackles the politics of gender. Featuring six charismatic female theoreticians and performers, Untitled Feminist Show humorously undermines the social constructs of the masculine and the feminine.

Kate McIntosh is already known for performances such as Dark Matter and Hair from the Throat, evidence of a rich, somewhat bizarre imagination and superior craftsmanship. In Untried Untested,
she once again goes hard at it. The performers test various materials
and each other and so find themselves in situations that are often
funny, frequently unexpected and sometimes downright dangerous.

In 1880, the French socialist politician Paul Lafargue, son-in-law of Karl Marx, wrote the satirical treatise Le doit à la paresse. If he were to return to our world today, he would shake his head in astonishment. What value does our society attach to relaxation, rest, silence, sleep and laziness? What influence can theatre have on your mental attitude? Fortunately, we have theatre-maker and artist Kris Verdonck and dancer and choreographer Alix Eynaudi who lovingly lull you to sleep in EXIT ...

The intention behind nothing’s for something is to make the
hidden moments in life visible and expose the reality behind the visible
world. Their sources of inspiration are Paul Klee, who danced while he
painted, Rainer Maria Rilke, the perfectionist of form and method, and
Georges Perec, the master of stories of everyday life. In nothing’s for something,
Avdal and Shinozaki go back to their roots and allow the experiences of
their site-specific projects to permeate this production for larger
theatres.

For the past ten years the choreographer Jonathan Burrows and composer
Matteo Fargion have been creating a furore with their deceptively simple
but humorous, virtuoso duets where dance and music enter into an
exciting relationship. Counting to One Hundred completes their second trilogy and plays breathtakingly with rhythm and counterpoint.