Thierry De Mey has been exploring the grey area between dance and music for more than 30 years. He has composed music for dance performances, directed films about dance, and constructed choreographic multimedia installations. In 2016, for the first time, he has created a dance performance for the big stage, in collaboration with Ensemble intercontemporain, the legendary Paris music ensemble founded by Pierre Boulez.

Looking at someone can have ‘kinaesthetic’ effects on you. The choreographer and philosopher Noé Soulier seeks out this feeling for movement in everyday actions. Actions that the dancers initiate, but do not complete. Just as in the martial art of jujitsu – one of Soulier’s sources of inspiration – you discern extremely precise, sensually entangled bodies.

Unrecognisable in his black and silver bee suit with Mickey-Mouse head, dancer Marc Iglesias appears on stage to the sound of Brazilian lounge music. He waddles and jumps, a dancing cartoon. UNTITLED is an amusing and wry dance about a time when entertainment is destroying everything.

What does danced polyphony look like? Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker confronts Gérard Grisey’s polyphony with a counterpoint for six dancers. In swirling, cyclical patterns, the formation of dancers and musicians moves across the stage – each dancer links his movements to the timbre of one of the six instruments.

Sophocles’ Antigone was the personification of resistance. For the first time in theatre history, a character breaks away from the group to claim a solo role opposite the orchestra. On this occasion it is Cecilia Lisa Eliceche who is taking the role. Full of confidence, she faces four musicians of Zwerm armed with electric guitars.

Anne Collod reworks the mediaeval danse macabre into a contemporary choreography — radiating fear, mourning, ritual and trance.

The choreographer Eszter Salamon looks back over a century of warfare. Together with her six dancers Salamon moulds a striking ‘dance of death’, using tribal dances and folk dances. All of these originate in conflicts on all five continents. Masked figures fight the horror in vibrant rituals!

A group of twelve performers explores the mystery of pleasure. In a long, sensual movement bodies touch, test, and lose their borders. They vibrate, entering into contact and composition with their environment, forming unexpected constellations. Mette Ingvartsen looks seven concepts of pleasure straight in the eye.

Het Theaterfestival 2015 -With incisiveness and ingenuity, Father examines the moments when an old man’s memories (or are they imaginings, hallucinations?) start constantly turning the realities of everyday life into fantasy. Spectacular dance scenes are alternated wondrously with intimate and moving images.