In 1924 Thomas Mann published his ‘great European novel’, The Magic Mountain. In June 2008 it will be 101 years ago that Mann sent his main character, Hans Castorpe, on a journey from Hamburg to Switzerland. Stan, Maatschappij Discordia, Cie. De Koe, Dood Paard and Willem de Wolf, the cream of our country’s theatre companies, celebrate this with a first episode of their adaptation of Mann’s ironic masterpiece.

KUNSTENFESTIVALDESARTS 08 - 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).

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.

Tony Kushner’s diptych Angels in America is a modern classic. America in the eighties. The politics are hard and cold. Aids is the new disease. A group of New Yorkers unintentionally appear in one another’s lives. The spectacle of world politics unfolds in the intimacy of a domestic drama.

Tony Kushner’s diptych Angels in America is a modern classic. America in the eighties. The politics are hard and cold. Aids is the new disease. A group of New Yorkers unintentionally appear in one another’s lives. The spectacle of world politics unfolds in the intimacy of a domestic drama.

Back in the USSR tells the story of three Soviet girls as seen through the eyes of a German journalist looking for archive pictures in the former Soviet block. What has happened to the young pioneers of that period, the members of the Komsomol youth organisation, of which an estimated two thirds of today’s adults were a member. Back in the USSR switches between past and present in an idiom that is highly expressive, musical and physical.

At the conference in Yalta (February 1945) the border between Germany and Poland was redrawn. As a result, millions of people were driven from their homes. This is what Transfer! is all about, a production by the Polish ‘angry young director’ Jan Klata, told and performed by people who experienced the drama at that time.

In 2006 Jan Decorte staged his first opera, Dido and Aeneas by the English baroque composer Henry Purcell. Together with the English conductor Richard Egarr and a select cast, Decorte made it an unforgettable event. De Morgen: ‘A gem of simplicity, rightness and emotion.’

After Mefisto for ever, Guy Cassiers is working on Wolfskers, the second part of a trilogy devoted to the discordant relationship between art, politics and power. Whereas Mefisto for ever showed an artist who allows himself to be seduced and corrupted by power, Wolfskers focuses on those in power themselves, with Hitler, Lenin and Hirohito as main figures.

Jan Decorte was one of the first theatre-makers in Flanders to work with the whimsical, poetical, seemingly untheatrical plays of Heiner Müller. Now, he would again like to confront the wildness and radicality of Müller’s work.

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.