Hiphop is alive and Zulu Nation is its prophet. For six years now this Belgian organisation has presented the Battle of the Year contest at, and in association with, the Kaaitheater. For the last two years Zulu Nation has also been responsible for the highly popular hiphop dance acts at our Long Night of Dance events.

KUNSTENFESTIVALDESARTS 08 - Over the last ten years Thomas Hauert has, both at home and abroad, shown himself to be a choreographer with a voice of his own. His latest piece, Accords, is an abstract choreographic composition that one experiences like a piece of music. The dancers physically transpose, amplify or distort the dynamics, harmony, melody and counterpoint in their bodies.

PRODUCTION CANCELLED! The new production by the American choreographer Jennifer Lacey and the French artist Nadia Lauro has modest beginnings: a simple curiosity about the shared space between the soloist and the group. Charles Fourier, Anne Lee, the Marquis de Sade, Roland Barthes and others are astonished to find themselves sitting together around the same campfire.

Ars Musica - At Expo 58, Varèse’s Poème électronique was performed in the Philips pavilion, which briefly put Belgium at the peak of developments in electronic music. On this night of electroacoustic music, while lying or sitting on cushions, you will be able to discover (or rediscover) the work of the pioneers, performed by the Orquestra del Caos, an orchestra without musicians.

Ars Musica - Over the last fifteen years, the French Accentus ensemble, led by Laurence Equilbey, has become one of Europe’s most renowned choruses. At Ars Musica, together with musicians from the Orchestre National de France, they will be performing a programme of religious works by Anton Bruckner, Olivier Messiaen, György Ligeti and Pascal Dusapin.

Ars Musica - Le Grand Gamelan is the title of a suite composed by Bo Van de Werf of the Octurn jazz ensemble for an imaginary gamelan group comprising the eight musicians of Octurn and the five percussionists from Ictus. The spirit of the ‘gamelan’ is evoked by the expanded percussion section (marimba, vibraphone, celeste, gongs, glockenspiel and tubular bells, and traditional elements of the gamelan).

Tony Kushner’s diptych Angels in America is a modern classic. America in the eighties. The politics are hard and cold. Aids is the new disease. A group of New Yorkers unintentionally appear in one another’s lives. The spectacle of world politics unfolds in the intimacy of a domestic drama.

Tony Kushner’s diptych Angels in America is a modern classic. America in the eighties. The politics are hard and cold. Aids is the new disease. A group of New Yorkers unintentionally appear in one another’s lives. The spectacle of world politics unfolds in the intimacy of a domestic drama.

Four ‘identical’ female dancers hang like marionettes in a huge ‘machine’. Together with them performance artist Kris Verdonck generated a passage of choreography: a solo, a duet, a trio and a pas de quatre. They sought the greatest possible freedom from the machine, but sooner or later it sent them in the direction it decided upon.

As five-year-olds they had already appeared together at a folk dance festival in their native Slovakia, went on to train as dancers and came across each other again while working with Rosas, Ultima Vez, Akram Khan and other excellent companies. This shared background forms the basis for their first piece of collective work. Les SlovaKs present energetic dance in a new version of the traditional, with a generous dash of poetry.

Directory 3: Tattoo is a brilliant study of the link between movement (choreo-) and writing (-graphy). The movement material arose out of a translation by each dancer of memories written down by the other. This yielded a captivating miniature portrait of the diversity of the world, drawn by five dancers and a musician. An exceptional performance!