History is written by winners. Including all the lies, chance encounters, and accidents de parcours. With this realization in mind, Jan Lauwers and Needcompany travel through time by way of the family trees of all the members. After an international tour – and being selected for the TheatreFestival 2016 – The blind poet is returning to the place where it premiered: the Kaaitheater.

Theatre director Thomas Bellinck thinks the time is ripe to scrutinize digital migration management. Can one simply outsource unease about social sorting? Discussions with border and data managers in the control rooms of Project Europe were the starting point of this documentary musical.

A masked soldier starts talking to the woman he is burying alive. This dialogue between victim and perpetrator gradually becomes absurd. The young Palestinian director Bashar Murkus confronts you both with a fictionalized reflection of the war in Syria and with a vision of the totalitarian violence that holds the Middle East in its grip.

When you read, you make choices. You translate what you read into the language of your life. A book like Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina could also be the collection of lives it has changed, for better or for worse. In this first play Tiago Rodrigues writes for tg STAN, he convincingly builds a bridge between the actors of the Portuguese Teatro Nacional and those of STAN.

Caspar Western Friedrich combines the narrative force of the Western with the dreamy longings of Romanticism. Drawing his inspiration from the lonesome cowboy and from the paintings and personality of Caspar David Friedrich, Philippe Quesne builds a studio of landscapes on stage.

The American quantum physicist David Bohm takes as his premise the self-regulating way in which a group of people functions. You never think alone, but are always linked to the thinking of others. Thus a discussion is the ideal place in which to research and maintain the patterns of this collective thinking – without a moderator.

This brand new production directed by Ivo Van Hove is based on Leoš Janácek’s song cycle that goes by the same name. The result of Janácek’s inspired efforts is a mysterious, deeply emotional and psychological piece on identity, alienation, and an impossible love. Annelies Van Parys – one of the most acclaimed Belgian composers of our time – adds a fi tting contemporary reply.

What do we actually mean when we say ‘we’? Who are we and how do we determine who belongs to this group – and most importantly, who doesn’t? With this new production, Laura van Dolron lays bare the delight and the danger inherent in our sense of who ‘we’ are. Expect a performance that first confronts and then – in true Dolron fashion – heals.

Based on the Golem myth – in which Jewish scholars bring dead matter to life, which subsequently turns against them – Thomas Ryckewaert creates an explicitly visual performance about ambition, creativity, power, creation, insanity, and destruction.

In 1918, as WW1 was gradually drawing to a close, François Georges Picot and Mark Sykes – a French and a British diplomat respectively – were studying the map of the Middle East. In a secret agreement, they redrew the borders, and the consequences of this act can still be felt today. In Vanishing State, Lucien Bourjeily gives you the chance to go through this exercise afresh, in the full knowledge of what has happened in the Levant over the past hundred years.

CAPSAICIN is that feeling you get when you have eaten a hot chilli pepper. But it could also be a place: a new Cape of Good Hope as a place of refuge. Together with Globe Aroma and newcomers to Brussels, Michiel Soete deals with longings that refuse to be thwarted by powerlessness, anger or fear.