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.

Sema Soma is the second project by PONI. The basis for Sema Soma comprises three key words: ritual, illusion and death. It is a powerful, energetic performance in which codes, signs and forms from theatre, art, film, music and so on are brought together: scraps of various languages which together form a new language. We shall be reviving this successful project in the Kaaitheater’s main theatre.

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.

The Italian poet, film-maker and novelist Pier Paolo Pasolini holds a monologue in which he considers politics, violence, power, Utopia, sex, life and death. His mother listens to him and we hear the angelic voice of Pasolini’s young brother who died at a tender age. In Intra-Muros Pasolini directs his last film. Or is it the direction of his own death?

It is certainly no coincidence that the two string quartets by Pascal Dusapin echo texts by Samuel Beckett. Dusapin feels very much at home in the universe of the great Irish writer. The two other works on the programme are also inspired by literature. Franck Bedrossian's Tracés d’ombres is a reference to Either/Or by Kierkegaard, and the young Franco-Czech composer Krystof Maratka finds inspiration in La Fontaine's fables.

Ictus and Ircam (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) are presenting a programme for ensemble and electronics in which rhythmic exploration and percussion play a central role. It will include works by the Italian Bruno Mantovani (1974) and the Frenchman Yan Maresz (1966), including two world premières.

Rosas devotes a full evening programme to the minimalist composer Steve Reich. Since the start of her career Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker has had an intimate attachment to Steve Reich’s music. Three choreographies will be performed by a new cast and there are two new choreographies based on Four Organs and Octet. With the exception of two pieces  the music will be performed live by the Ictus ensemble.

In 2005, the French choreographer Xavier Le Roy created a staged concert with music by the German composer Helmut Lachenmann. We shall be showing the second part of this performance on the closing evening of Pasta for Tired Dancers; the music is Lachenmann’s guitar duet Salut für Caudwell (1977). In the second part you can hear the renowned guitarist and composer Martin Siewert, presenting his musical response to Salut für Caudwell.

The Viennese composer and computer musician Bernhard Lang often works with choreographers, video artists, and DJs, and this is made apparent in the programme for the evening, which meanders around his work. It is the aesthetics of the loop, the repetition, that connects the various parts of the programme.

Linked to Alvin Lucier’s attendance of Pasta for Tired Dancers, the theatre-maker and theorist Bojana Cvejić will be showing music and live art films from the sixties and seventies, including work by John Cage, Nam June Paik, La Monte Young, Alvin Lucier and Robert Rauschenberg.

Mårten Spångberg’s Powered by Emotion is a reconstruction of Steve Paxton’s Goldberg Variations. Bojana Cvejić shows and comments on scenes from concerts, stage plays and dance productions made on the basis of Glenn Gould’s legendary recordings of the Goldberg Variations.