What would hell look like today? The 500th anniversary of the death of Hieronymus Bosch, made Vasco Mendonça, Kris Verdonck and Dimitri Verhulst think. They quickly arrived at the beaches of Lampedusa: a place where while tourists were sunbathing refugees were washed up on the beach. The false paradise of the resorts and the Boschian hell on earth seamlessly flow into each other.

The young Croatian philosopher, author and political activist Srećko Horvat is undoubtedly one of the leading voices of his generation. His talk starts from Fernando Pessoa’s novel The Anarchist Banker and then provides a unique theoretical insight into possible subversions in a time which is getting darker day by day.

In times of declarations of war, the revival of nationalistic thinking and an excess of extreme, simplistic solutions, the French-Austrian theatre collective Superamas offers fresh points of view. Vive l’Armée ! is a reflection on war, violence, propaganda and nationalism, based on the familiar Superamas recipe – a continuously interlinked mix of storylines.

Four dancers become musicians onstage. They deftly – and with a great sense of humour – strip traditional Alpine music, group dances and rituals of their conventions and conservatism. After SunBengSitting, Simon Mayer is continuing his exploration of the nature of tradition.

A prostitute in a North African country during the Arab Spring immerses you in the everyday drag of clients who come and go. Rachid Benzine – Europe’s great herald of enlightened Islam – wrote the text for the Palestinian film actress Hiam Abbass. Director Ruud Gielens opted for a staging that is as restrained as it is intense. After its première last season – two days after the Brussels attacks – it is time to reprise the production.

The American moral philosopher Susan Neiman has written books such as Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age and Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists. In them, she always seeks to chart a middle course between blind utopianism and cynical realism. She also describes this as ‘idealism for adults’: an idealism that determines who we are, does not shy away from the world as it is, but does permit itself to look beyond it in search of fresh possibilities.

For his Concertos, the born performer Ivo Dimchev always invites a different musician for a voice improvisation in the form of a concert. At the Kaaitheater, he performs alongside the composer and pianist Lea Petra, who has been highly praised for her tango transcriptions for piano.

This is a woman who, on payment, you briefly possess, but rarely to love her. She wants to save her daughter from the solitude into which her own fate has plunged her. She sees the hope of a new life disintegrate at the start of the Arab Spring.

Guided by headphones and holding a flashlight to illuminate the darkness of a big, empty and dormant theatre, you're cast as an 'extra' in what appears to be a dream-like rehearsal of powerlessness.

Politics and religion have lost their credibility and parents are losing control of their children. According to Paul Verhaeghe, we are at a turning point in history. The patriarchal form of authority – which has for centuries determined everything, both public and private – is finished. In Authority, his latest book, Verhaeghe examines how we reached this point.