Over the last few years, the Mechelen collective Abattoir Fermé has built up a strong repertoire that swings between dream, hallucination and nightmare. Snuff (Index 1) is the company’s first production for the large stage. It premieres at the Kaaitheater.

Merlin Spie is a visual artist: she does sculptures and drawings, and also installations and performances of which she herself forms a part. Her latest project, Le silence des danses, comprises three performances in three different places in the Kaaistudios.

On the exact day of the centenary of publication of the Futurist Manifesto in Le Figaro, the director and multimedia artist Claudio Sinatti and the composer Black Fanfare/Demetrio Castellucci are presenting a project based on the poetics of Futurism to create something entirely new. The live-media performance will use present-day idioms and media to look at the hundred-year-old aesthetics of Futurism.

The artistic duo of Ivo Provoost and Simona Denicolai attacks the petrified codes of daily life with gentle subversion, the excitement of activism, mature scepticism and fun. Danai Anesiadou presents her performance One measures a circle, beginning anywhere, a mixture of theatre, autobiography, black magic and avant-garde film.

On 20th February 1909, the first Futurist Manifesto, by Marinetti, appeared on the front page of Le Figaro. It was the start of a long series of 20th-century avant-gardes. Exactly one hundred years later, the demands and expectations of the time are being reviewed and commemorated. After a reading of the manifesto performed by Sara De Roo and clarification by the Marinetti expert Sascha Bru (Ghent University), the writer Jeroen Olyslaeghers, artist Danny De Vos and poet Dirk van Bastelaere will respond to several key concepts in this hundred-year-old document.

‘Is it possible to have a robot that is able to say or act lines from Beckett?’ This question is the basis for Actor # 1 by the artist and theatre-maker Kris Verdonck. You will have the chance to look at his research process. Writing by Beckett will be ‘brought to life’ by means of interactive media (Felix Luque) and a voice. We shall hear ‘live’ reactions to this from the geneticist Jean Jacques Cassiman, the neurosurgeon Dirk de Ridder and the philosopher and mathematician Jean Paul Van Bendegem.

&&&&& & &&&& is about science and fiction and the link between them, about the future that is already in our lives today, about the possibility of finding intergalactic phenomena in a cardboard box, and about migrating to more agreeable planets, etc. It is both a performance and an exhibition, serious and crazy. You are free to wander around on stage and to enter the performance at any moment.

Melting glaciers, burning forests, cities under water, screens and cameras spying on us, weapons of mass destruction... End starts out from the images the media project onto our retinas. The performance artist Kris Verdonck shows the possible final stages of a human society in ten scenes that are linked by a monologue by a speaking character (Johan Leysen).

In his work with CREW, Eric Joris seeks a mixture of theatre and technology. EUX is based on the idea of the ‘doppelgänger’. Through the use of technological protheses, the visitor’s body is duplicated in a mirror image that appears to be more real than the ‘true image’. The project offers an ‘immersive’ experience for one person at a time. An ‘immersive’ experience.

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.

In the twentieth century, mobility became the symbol of freedom and progress. But at a time of greenhouse gases and peak oil, the symbolic value of mobility is being rapidly reversed. And a different, more distressing form of mobility is making its appearance: that of climate refugees.