Apart from ‘regular’ performances, over the past years Needcompany has also developed a theatrical laboratory setting that is open to the public: Needlapb. Lap refers to laptop and lab to laboratory: two experimental spaces.

The Nature Theater of Oklahoma – the name comes from the last chapter of Kafka’s novel America – is one of New York’s most talented theatre companies of the last few years. The directors Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper create clever, funny, very physical and unconventional productions. No Dice is an ‘epic of everyday life’. An epic in which there is room for false moustaches and pirate hats.

1993: the former Yugoslavia collapses. Sarajevo is an occupied city. In New York, five characters meet. One of them has just returned from Sarajevo. This symbolic city becomes the benchmark against which the five gauge their own questions, expectations and even ambitions. What can they do? What should they do? In Sarajevo, the playwright and director Rudi Meulemans explores new territory in his writing.

Mythobarbital / Val der Titanen (formerly announced as Deviant), a new piece by Stef Lernous, Tine Van den Wyngaert, Kirsten Pieters and Chiel van Berkel who share a fascination for the outsider, the underground and everything that deviates from the norm. Their nasty but witty plays can best be described as existential horror theatre.

Tristero is presenting AN, their own version of Attempts On Her Life (1997), Crimp’s masterpiece. Who is An? She seems to be able to assume a great many guises. On this ‘confusing’ basis, Tristero as always creates an accessible, intelligent and humorous theatre experience with a bitter aftertaste.

The theater of the German Raimund Hoghe is both intimate and universal. In Lettere amorose he works with authentic love letters, borrowed from other people’s lives, with his own body and with space. Classical and popular music stands side by side on the soundtrack. A high point in Hoghe’s work.

A wonderful debut by Tine Van Aerschot as a writer and director. A subtle and at times enchanting play whose staging is sober and compelling. De Morgen: ‘Claire Marshall plays a subtle game with the distance between herself and her character. This is acting of great subtlety. A moving portrait.’