Two Brussels-based collectives – the Dutch-speaking Tristero and the French-speaking Transquinquennal – have decided to work together. Both partners in this exceptional coalition have a reputation for seeking out unknown and/or contemporary pieces. In Coalition they take a closer look at events which need not have happened and might not have happened, but which did happen: from the most banal traffic accidents to major disasters involving thousands of deaths. In other words: things could have turned out differently.

Russia in 1920: the artistic and social revolution are flourishing but the bewilderment is total when Stalin’s merciless trials start. The lyrics in this musical theatre show consist of a literal transcription of the final minutes in the trial of Fyodor Bukharin interwoven with extracts from the work of Daniil Harms, another victim of Stalin’s terror. William Kentridge is responsible for the animated film and the directing, and François Sarhan, whose fantastic L’Nfer was performed at the Kaaitheater earlier in the season, wrote the music.

New choreography by Marc Vanrunxt for the dancer Eva Kamala Rodenburg, in collaboration with the photographer David Bergé and the researcher Myriam Van Imschoot. The solo becomes a projection plane for passing images, shapes and movements. This choreography is like an installation still under construction, pushing its ultimate identity in front of it.

New performance by Abke Haring, in association with poet and theatre-maker Bart Meuleman. Sound (Senjan Jansen) and image (the artist Jean Bernard Koeman) play an interactive role.

Unleash your inner genius and build your own robot. You don’t have to be a technical wizard – you will get a long way with a little imagination and the expert guidance of the German artist Ralf Schreiber and his associate, the scientist Christian Faubel. Your robot will be brought to life on an overhead projector. And afterwards you can take it home. There is a workshop for children from 8 to 12 and an open workshop for older children and adults.

The New York artist Vito Acconci is considered a pioneer of performance art. Starting out from the video work exhibited at Argos, Vito Acconci is giving a talk on his work, from poetry through video and performance art to architecture and design. It seems that the step from one medium to the next is not such a big one – the focus is always on language and body in relation to space.

Stelarc is an Australian performance artist. The basic principle of his ideas is that the body is an obsolete, outdated machine. He regards the protheses, robots or interventions he designs as an extension of the bodily machine’s capacity. In his lecture-demonstration, he examines three of his works of art.

In The Making of Doubt, the Scottish choreographer Colette Sadler puts four dancers and several puppets and prostheses on stage. She uses them to play a clever and witty game with reality, fiction and manipulation. How much authenticity do we need to believe in the fake? ‘The physical transformation of dancers by means of their costumes raises associations with the Triadisches Ballett by the Bauhaus exponent Oskar Schlemmer’ (8Weekly.nl).

In his video animations for Performatik, Luca Buvoli creates free associations on Futurist themes. He combines personal and historical stories: interviews with Marinetti’s daughters and adepts of Futurism, archive documents about political meetings and memories of the numerous air shows he visited in his youth. Buvoli questions the authoritarian and threatening side of our fascination with velocity and power.

In you are here the theatre is seen as an information network in which objects and technology play an active, almost human, role. The theatre is an archive in which information is stored, ordered, retrieved and passed on. You, the spectator, follow a route that keeps within the theatre’s codes and systems.

How can we work on scenarios for the future in such harsh times? Beyond dystopia, beyond the apocalypse! How can we work on the future the way we would really like to, as a community. What would the transition to a low-oil society look like? Sometimes utopian, sometimes real, but always full of imagination.