In 1998, together with the pupils of the Maria Boodschap primary school in Brussels, the composer Walter Hus created a children’s opera about the fantasy of night and dreams. Hus is now reviving this opera with about 300 children from 6 to 13 from the Academy of Word and Music in Sint-Agatha-Berchem (Brussels), where he teaches piano.

The Dutch company Monk took its inspiration for Dakhemelruimte from two mythical masterpieces of Dutch literature, Nescio’s De uitvreter and Titaantjes. But set a hundred years later. Today. An analysis of society that is both deadly serious and humorous.

The Wooster Group goes opera. Elizabeth LeCompte directs La Didone (1641) by Cavalli and Busenello, about the tragic love of the Trojan prince Aeneas and the Carthaginian queen Dido. The New Yorkers create an unexpected synergy between courtly romance and science fiction.

L’affaire Martin! etc. by René Pollesch squares up to the so-called authentic images shown in film, on TV and in the theatre, denounces the controversial film The Lives of Others and flirts with the popular vaudeville theatre of Feydeau.

The collective Abattoir Fermé has developed a theatrical idiom very much its own, sort of an existential horror theatre. In Testament, death is thrown on the dissecting table. From graveyard to public dissection, from autopsy to mourning: you will see death in all its guises. For the visual idiom used in Testament, the author and director Stef Lernous drew his inspiration from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground.

After their performance on the Austrian empress Sisi, Rudi Meulemans and De Parade create a new production on the tragic fate of the Habsburgers. On 19th June 1867 Maximilian, emperor of Mexico, died before a firing squad. The starting point of the performance is the extraordinary painting by Eduard Manet depicting this execution. A production about art, politics and censorship.

Robinson Crusoe, de vrouw en de neger is part of a series of stage adaptations of novels Johan Simons has done since last season at NTGent, dealing with the theme of ‘the foreigner’ in our society. After Arnon Grunberg and Michel Houellebecq it was Coetzee’s turn. In his short novel Foe Coetzee rewrites the colonial myth of Robinson Crusoe from a postcolonial perspective.

In 2002 Jan Lauwers made the feature film Goldfish Game with the Needcompany performers. The film tells the story of a small community: a family, a few friends and servants together in a large country house. Beneath the tangle of their relationships smoulder all manner of secrets, which are brought to the surface by the arrival of a stranger. What seemed like a paradise changes into a hell.

Tristero is now presenting the third rerun of the hilarious comedy Abigail’s Party by the British author and film-maker Mike Leigh. The play tells of the ups and downs of smart couples on a modern residential estate. In Great Britain it is a cult classic and Tristero is well on the way to achieving the same with its version, which was first made in 2004.

Unique European building project! Mega-fantastic superfun! Hundreds of people are at work on the ‘Shopping Culture Leisure Dome’. People who make dreams come true and can’t stand the sight of each other... In ECO the playwright Oscar van Woensel and Dood Paard once again put their finger on the contemporary pulse.

In 1993, immediately after the first Gulf War, the American dramatist John Jesurun wrote Philoktetes, an adaptation of the Greek myth. Philoctetes has a wound that smells so noxious that he is banned to an uninhabited island by his comrades-in-arms on the way to Troy. Ten years after, he is visited by Odysseus and Neoptolemus.  In his staging, Jesurun opts for a combination of acting and  video.