The Extra Sensorial Garden is a fictional garden that has been artificially created to stimulate the visitor’s sensory system and evoke strong physical experiences. There is not always a lot to see, but instead there’s a lot to be sensed.

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.

What is personal? How do you present it or express it in artistic work? Christine De Smedt took these and other questions to fellow choreographers Jonathan Burrows, Alain Platel, Xavier Le Roy and Eszter Salomon. On the basis of these interviews, she created portraits of four artists which evolve into a portrait of herself.

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. Cheap Lecture is a rhythmic spoken performance set to
music, a tirade about empty hands, audiences, time, repetition and dance
and a few other things. The Cow Piece plays with text, movement and sounds, but also with objects.

Spoken World - Character Witness takes as its starting-point the autobiographies
of historical figures such as Malcolm X, Hillary Clinton, Margaret
Thatcher and Ariel Sharon. They each explain or justify some of their
controversial political decisions on the basis of childhood experiences.
Their stories are merged into a single speech, which will be delivered
by three actors.