#BigNames

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Meg Stuart / Damaged Goods

CASCADE

dance performance

dance

Thu 02.09 - Sat 04.09.21

In CASCADE, Meg Stuart and seven dancers reset the clock, and challenge reality to reconfigure itself. Balancing on the edge of a world that is rapidly disappearing, they plunge their bodies into another dimension. CASCADE is an unconditional surrender to what we do not know about the unknown other. Step into this free fall to the crumbling of time!

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker / Rosas, Alain Franco & Pavel Kolesnikov

The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988

dance music

dance

Wed 01.09 - Sat 18.09.21

The Goldberg Variations belong to Bach’s late period in which the composer pushed the possibilities of musical themes to the extreme in an interplay of variations, canons, and fugues. After The Six Brandenburg Concerto, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker continues her journey with Bach in dialogue with these variations. Along with pianists Pavel Kolesnikov and Alain Franco she brings The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, a solo performance danced by herself. Here too, the musical score forms a blueprint for the choreography.

Trajal Harrell

The Köln Concert

dance

Fri 08.10 - Sat 09.10.21

Trajal Harrell has come up with a plan he has been pursuing for years: a choreography to Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert, the most successful piano solo recording of all time. The Köln Concert seeks a language that allows for closeness despite the times of physical distancing. The joint experience of tender, vulnerable, dancing people, is a reminder of the need to remain close to each other despite everything.

Needcompany

Billy’s Violence

theatre

Fri 29.10 - Sat 30.10.21

Shakespeare is the most widely read and performed author in Western literary history. Yet many of the Bard's texts are almost unplayable because of the violence, horror, racism and misogyny. What does violence mean in art today? For Billy's Violence, Victor Afung Lauwers researched ten tragedies by Shakespeare and rewrote them into violently loving, intimate dialogues in which women are central. You may never have seen Shakespeare this boned and dusted.

Jan Decorte en Sigrid Vinks / Bloet

BLOOD LTD by Bloet

theatre

Tue 09.11 - Wed 10.11.21

In the coming years, Jan Decorte and Sigrid Vinks will focus on collaborating with young performers. BLOOD LTD by Bloet is a project with the density of a black hole. All themes, visions, opinions, dogmas and manifestos are swallowed up and evolve from a meaningless zero to a meaningful chaos. Jan Decorte and Sigrid Vinks, together with Ika Schwander and Oumar Dicko, create their own theatre language: light, whispering and fleeting.

Gisèle Vienne

L’Etang

theatre

Thu 18.11 - Sat 20.11.21

Gisèle Vienne returns to Kaaitheater with a text adaptation by the Swiss writer Robert Walser. L'Etang (the pond) is a musical theatre play about a child who feels unloved by his mother. At the height of his despair and as an ultimate attempt to win her love, he feigns suicide in a pond. The children and teenagers of the village are embodied by fifteen human-sized dolls, Stephen O'Malley from cult group SUN O))) is once more responsible for the music.

Manuela Infante

How to Turn to Stone

theatre

Thu 25.11 - Fri 26.11.21

A play that behaves like a stone: what would that look like? What form would a 'mineral' representation take? In How to Turn to Stone, stones, as 'non-living' things, are models for a different kind of resistance. Manuela Infante brings pieces of eroded stories together. The fragments become landscapes and she stacks those landscapes like geological rock layers. This creates a 'mineral' representation telling you something about what is written in stones, and what stones have written in us.

Dans voor actrice (Jolente De Keersmaeker)

Jérôme Bel & tg STAN

dance

Wed 01.12 - Thu 02.12.21

For this performance, choreographer Jérôme Bel asked actress Jolente de Keersmaeker not to play any of her usual roles from the theatre repertoire but to perform pieces from modern dance. Yet Dance for an Actress is not just a dance performance. As Jolente de Keermaeker still has some way to being a professional dancer, she throws all the usual formality of dance overboard. Expect an evening as dancing as it is theatrical on the cutting edge of movement and words, of body and imagination.

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker/Rosas & Ictus

Drumming (live)

dance

Wed 15.12 - Sun 19.12.21

Drumming (1998) is returning to Kaaitheater! It’s one of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s most iconic choreographies, written to the eponymous, minimalistic percussion score by Steve Reich. A wave of pure dance and pure sound, a vortex of vital energy. For this run of Drumming, the music is performed live by Ictus: don't let this unique opportunity pass you by.

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker/Rosas & Pavel Kolesnikov

CANCELLED: The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988

dance music

dance

Thu 03.12 - Sun 13.12.20

Please note: this show has been cancelled to help contain the spread of the new coronavirus.

After The Six Brandenburg Concerto, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker continues her journey with Bach in dialogue with these variations. Along with pianist Pavel Kolesnikov she brings The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, a solo performance danced by De Keersmaeker herself. Here too, the musical score forms a blueprint for the choreography.

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker / Rosas

CANCELLED: Drumming

dance

Fri 09.10 - Sat 31.10.20

Please note: this show has been cancelled to help contain the spread of the new coronavirus.

Drumming (1998) is returning to Brussels! It’s one of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s most iconic choreographies, written to the eponymous, minimalistic percussion score by Steve Reich. A wave of pure dance and pure sound, a vortex of vital energy.

Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods

Celestial Sorrow

dance performance

dance

Wed 24.06 - Sat 27.06.20

Please note: this show has been cancelled to help contain the spread of the new coronavirus.

Celestial Sorrow is Meg Stuart’s first collaboration with the Indonesian visual artist Jompet Kuswidananto. Based in collective memories and fictitious traumas, the duo create a world of light and movement that is inhabited by three performers and two musicians. The show premiered at the Kaaistudios in 2018 and is moving to the main stage of Kaaitheater for this reprise.

Daniel Linehan

sspeciess

dance

Fri 12.06 - Sat 13.06.20

Please note: this show has been cancelled to help contain the spread of the new coronavirus.

Daniel Linehan creates a choreography in which the lighting, the scenography, the costumes, the movement, and the music each dominate the stage in turn, and then fade to make space for the others. This constant cycle of emergence and disappearance creates an interplay in which unnoticed elements suddenly demand your attention, eliciting unsuspected moments of wonder.

Guy Cassiers/Toneelhuis

Antigone in Molenbeek + Tiresias [double bill]

theatre

Thu 04.06 - Sun 07.06.20

These performances are cancelled because the tour has been postponed due to the coronavirus.

Encyclopédie de la parole

Suite n° 4

theatre music

theatre

Tue 19.05 - Sun 24.05.20

Please note: this show has been cancelled to help contain the spread of the new coronavirus.

In the first part of Suite n° 4, recognizable and anonymous voices overlap as though they were coming from different acoustic spaces. In the second part, the voices are accompanied by eight musicians from Ictus. The Encyclopédie de la parole collective presents a performance about absence, like an opera without singers or a theatre without actors. For 150 minutes, you hear a thousand concrete situations in more than 30 languages.