This performance is a joint venture by the artist Hans Op de Beeck and writer-actor Pieter De Buysser. The piece physically links visual art and theatre, with Hans creating an object and Pieter writing a play to perform alongside it. Hans has constructed a chest with hidden cupboards and drawers. Pieter has devised a story about storing things away and forgetting them, a story that’s part blood-curdling fairytale, part edgy road movie.

Dood Paard presents a performance of the oldest play we know in Western history: The Persians,
written by Aeschylus (b. 525 BC). In this play he criticises the
imperialist course taken by Greece in his day, and warns against Greek
pride. Dood Paard has made a new adaptation of the play and reduces the
tragedy to its core: a story about the overconfident enemy.

For quarter of a century, Forced Entertainment have been confirming their position as trailblazers in contemporary British theatre. In their new production, they take their fill of hopeful clichés and other dreams of the future. Tomorrow’s Parties offers a playful, poignant and at times delirious look forwards to futures both possible and impossible.

The Nature Theater of Oklahoma is returning to the Kaaitheater with the second episode of their brilliant saga Life and Times. While Episode 1 began with birth and continued to age 8, Episode 2 takes the tale on to the age of 14, a time of full longing, losers, and smoking in the woods. The Rosas dancer Fumiyo Ikeda is also taking part in this new episode!

Tine Van Aerschot is creating a new, intense theatre performance. We are not afraid of the dark is an exercise in survival, sometimes joyful, sometimes dark, a somewhat unusual guide to dealing with fear and an attempt to understand our transient lives.

In This is how you will disappear, the French theatre-maker
Gisèle Vienne appears to be bringing the work of David Lynch, Alain
Robbe-Grillet or Lewis Carroll to the stage. She is working on the
boundary between dream and reality, and between appearance and reality.
Nothing is what it seems, and everything is bursting with symbolism.

In The Search Project, Tristero appeared on stage with no fewer than thirteen actors; in Reset the company goes back to the essence. Kristien De Proost, Youri Dirkx and Peter Vandenbempt take on the task of giving the company a ‘reboot’. The ideal moment to (re)discover Tristero!

Analysis – The Whole Song is the final piece in a trilogy on
contemporary opera. After The Ballad of Ricky and Ronny – a Pop Opera
(2007) and Ricky and Ronny and Hundred Stars – a Sado Country Opera
(2010), MaisonDahlBonnema are now entering into dialogue with the new
media. Ricky and Ronny, find themselves in various historical situations
and are confronted with iconic historical figures. A concert full of
cries from the heart.

Spoken World - When Pablo Emilio Escobar, the notorious, ruthless drugs baron from Medellin, was finally shot, a speech was found in his back pocket, intended for the day he would be elected president. Taking these mythical notes by Escobar as their inspiration, Mapa Teatro
has made a paradoxical production on the legalisation of drugs.

Spoken World - The writer and theatre-maker Tim Etchells builds up a new performance – a speech for the performance artist Kate McIntosh – out of bits and pieces of other speeches. Although We Fell Short is comical and unsettling, subjecting the familiar rhetorical strategies of political speeches to a test of their linguistic breaking-point.

Peter Verhelst has written a piece about Nero’s childhood and directs it himself. Wim Opbrouck acts, plays music and dances. He is the little Nero, the boy obsessed with the scraps of music he can hear everywhere, who sings in the dark to ward off his fear. The boy who cuts animals open out of curiosity. Out of love. Always in search of something warm, something sweet, something soft.