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.

Axel is a biogeneticist and married to Theresa. When their son dies and his wife leaves him, Axel decides to commit suicide. He puts on his best suit and goes to his favourite restaurant to eat lobster one last time, but the waiter stumbles and the lobster lands on Axel’s white suit. The Lobster Shop mixes situations real and surreal, reality and fiction, theatre, dance and music.

The work of the Swiss ensemble Klara is a cross between theatre and performance. DNA oscillates between a family soap and a biology lesson, and historical facts and fiction. The thread is the story of the O’Flatterys, whose wanderings are followed throughout the twentieth century. A phenomenal creation!

A woman (Forced Entertainment’s Claire Marshall) on an almost empty stage. She lists what she does not want, what she will not do... The text, a stream of near-thoughts and near-questions, starts out from the pettiness and futility of human experiences and frustrations and from there looks for the universal and the general. Tine Van Aerschot, an artist by training, makes her debut as writer and director.

Guy Cassiers opens his first season as artistic director of Het Toneelhuis with a theatre parable about art and politics. With Tom Lanoye, he adapted Klaus Mann’s novel, Mefisto for ever. Germany in the twenties and thirties. A successful actor becomes a popular performer in the highest circles of the Third Reich. Acting is his passion and he holds art sacred, above all… but at what price?