Bye Bye Kaai – a farewell party for the current Kaaitheater building

Due to extensive renovations, Kaaitheater is temporarily leaving its building on the Sainctelettesquare at the beginning of July. Before entering a nomadic life for the next two years, and presenting shows in many places in Brussels, we will bid farewell to the current building on 18 June with a bang! Bye Bye Kaai will be a day full of memories and wishes for the future. The programme includes Adieu & Merci by Latifa Laâbissi, a long moment of toasting curated by Louis Janssens, a conversation between dramaturges Esther Severi and Edith Cassiers about the work of Marianne van Kerkhoven a reading of the last text by Jan Ritsema and Jonathan Burrows now read by Jonathan Burrows and Bojana Cvejić, a redemptive performance of Olympia Bukkakis, a farewell ritual by Barbara Raes/Beyond the Spoken, workshops by Toestand vzw, a real party parti.e, and more! Discover the full programme here.

Kaaitheater⎢18/06⎢theatre & performance⎢in Dutch, French and English

Antoine Defoort

Elles vivent - Belgian premiere

In the near future, two friends meet in a forest. Michel, just back from two years of deep mindfulness in an ashram, did not follow the news. Taylor hurries to tell him about his adventures with the 'Context and Modality Platform', a kind of political party that - as an out-of-control joke and against all odds - has landed at the gates of power. Taylor tells his story using a nifty futuristic device that can project your memories in front of you as a hologram.

Michel has so many questions. Are Taylor and his friends crushed by the media steamroller and the evil intentions of their opponents? And did they start a new, revolutionary school of magic?

Antoine Defoort studied science and visual arts before turning to theatre in 2005. He is part of l'Amicale, a cooperative production platform that develops, accompanies and disseminates live art projects. It is the first time that he is on the Kaaitheater programme.

Kaaitheater⎢15, 16/06⎢theatre & performance⎢in French (surtitled in Dutch)

Khadija El Kharraz Alami
The Waves

The Waves is a ritual, a manifesto, an immersive experience in which feminine beauty, vulnerability and pain are central. Together with four young actresses, Khadija El Kharraz Alami wants to explore how deeply internalized experiences of oppression and abuse of power can be transformed into a creative force. An urgent and uncompromising theatrical experience, based on the eponymous book by Virginia Woolf and on essays by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Audre Lorde and Simon(e) van Saarloos, among others.

Khadija El Kharraz Alami graduated from the Utrecht School of the Arts in 2014. In her work, she shows the human being searching for identity, and failing to do so. The Waves premiered in April at deSingel and will be presented on the Kaaitheater stage just over a month after its world premiere.

Kaaitheater⎢07, 08/06⎢theatre

buren
SPARE TIME WORK

In SPARE TIME WORK, the buren collective analyses the social and economic forces that regulate ‘free time’ and ‘work’ in our Western society. In an associative narrative, the makers link personal memories to the history of free time and labour, and to the evolution of women’s labour in Belgium and abroad. The complex relationships between master and servant, dirty and clean, and between suffering and enjoyment form the inspiration for this playful sci-fi park. 

buren – the collective led by Oshin Albrecht and Melissa Mabesoone – is located somewhere at the intersection between performance, theatre and visual art. With irony, humour and a future-oriented imagination, they play with themes like the feminine, pop music and neoliberal fantasies. SPARE TIME WORK premiered in November at Playground Festival and will be presented for the first time in Brussels at Kaaitheater.

Kaaitheater⎢04/06⎢performance & music⎢in English

Femke Gyselinck
Letters 2 Dance

What is the relationship between movement and typography, between dance and letter images? It is a choreographic version of Gymnastics of the Mind, a research project inspired by the book ABECEDA from 1926. Femke Gyselinck, Sue-Yeon Youn and Luka Švajda are on stage together with the eclectic musician-composer Liesa Van der Aa. Light-coloured, transparent surfaces appear like pages on the stage, the dancing bodies form the tip of a pen. They create a dance alphabet while dancing, which you, the spectator, can decipher.

Dancer and choreographer Femke Gyselinck (ex-P.A.R.T.S.) has already appeared in the Kaaitheater programme with Flamer (with her brother, drummer Lander Gyselinck) and Moving Ballads - both pieces in which music plays a central role. Letters 2 Dance premiered in March at kunstencentrum nona and has since been touring across Flanders.

Kaaitheater⎢11, 12/06⎢dance & music

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker & Amandine Beyer / Rosas & Gli Incogniti
Mystery Sonatas /  For Rosa

After The Goldberg Variations, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker continues her choreographic journey with the fifteen virtuoso Mystery Sonatas, the best-known compositions by Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber. Attracted by the clarity of its musical structure and its numerological approach, De Keersmaeker immersed herself in the mystical and geometrical richness of this music, making the Sonatas her own in a choreography for six dancers.

For this creation Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker renews her collaboration with violinist Amandine Beyer (and her ensemble Gli Incogniti), with whom she previously made Partita 2 and The Six Brandenburg Concertos. This spring you can also experience Dark Red, a 'danced exhibition' in Rosas' home base in Forest. Mystery Sonatas / For Rosa premiered in February at Concertgebouw Brugge and has since been touring across Europe. 

Cirque Royal⎢23, 25, 26/06⎢dance & music

Elles vivent by Antoine Defoort is co-funded by ACT & the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union