Spring forward
& lose yourself in 2024

It is with great regret that we have to cancel this performance last-minute.  Due to the highly volatile weather and the fragility of the performance, we cannot sufficiently guarantee the safety of the dancers. Ticket holders will be notified via email. We apologise for the inconvenience.

In her latest performance, Danish choreographer and dancer Mette Ingvartsen brings the skate park to the Arsenaal site.  A  group of skaters and dancers explore the speed and energy of movement on wheels. On the rhythms of dark beats, we watch skaters seek freedom with ollies, kickflips and backsides.

A show about failure, by two award-winning failures. After failing to win numerous awards and after many unsuccessful funding applications, 24 Italian Songs and Arias is a recital, an opera, a gathering for (and by) those whose best isn’t always enough.


(Beloved) performance artist Brian Lobel failed to get into the New York State Choir. (Acclaimed) Soprano Gweneth-Ann Rand (4.48 Psychosis, Royal Opera House; Aida, English National Opera) failed to win at Cardiff Singer of the World. These two magnificent failures have joined forces to create a show about trying your best, aiming to please and how we ever know if we are ‘good enough’.

There’s no dress code…but you won’t be turned away for donning a top hat or silky gloves, should the mood strike you. 

Cast: Brian Lobel, Gweneth-Ann Rand, Allyson Devenish and Naomi Felix

In collaboration with the choir of laGeste

Developed with support from The Yard, London, Certain Blacks and Arts Council England.

Press quotes:

“It’s hard to resist the gorgeous final moments which remind that sometimes imperfection is far more interesting than flawless perfection, and often just having a go is a success in itself”

 Lyn Gardner - Stagedoor

“Without romanticising failure or bitterly rehashing it, this is a performance about frustration, drifting and feeling ‘not good enough’”

Tatjana Damjanovic - The Spy in the Stalls

Having seen Thomas Ryckewaert as an actor in 'The Serpent' and 'Het Goddelijke Monster' and as a theater maker in 'Golem' and 'Genesis,' he now attempts to grapple with a series of calamities in 'Chaos - Making Sense of an Ending'.

Over the course of a few years, Ryckewaert lost his father, witnessed the outbreak of a pandemic, and observed the worsening state of the climate. From a video game about zombies ('The Last Of Us'!) and scientific theories to apocalyptic science fiction and a seemingly extinct fish, Ryckewaert embraces chaos to confront his demons.

In 'Chaos,' the boundaries between the intimate and the global, the internal and external worlds, and reality and madness blur. Can science provide assistance on a chaotic, unpredictable planet? Can one grieve for a loved one and for the end of the world simultaneously? Is there poetry in theory? And what about theater?

Is de tijd rijp voor de export van de Heilige Koe? Zet je schrap voor een vertelling, performance, diner, documentaire en politieke satire in één. 

De Indiaas-Nederlandse performer Abhishek Thapar brengt visuele en intieme performances die zich bewegen tussen documentaire en fictie. Vanuit een persoonlijk perspectief raakt hij globale thema’s aan. Met de theatervoorstelling ‘Cow is a Cow is a Cow’ duikt hij in de economie en politiek in India, waar de koe beschouwd wordt als een heilig dier. Terwijl hij een verse Biryani maakt, vertelt Thapar over zijn jeugdjaren in India en lanceert in één beweging een nieuw merk van producten op basis van koeien. 

Thapar neemt je mee op een indrukwekkende koeienjacht door India, langs religie en rationaliteit, geweld en economie, historische verhalen en toekomstvoorspellingen. Klein detail: alles wat hij vertelt, is waargebeurd. 

Can you save the world from the kitchen? In 'ZEEMAAL,' theater maker Sien Vanmaele explores sustainable culinary solutions to address her concerns about our planet and climate change. Her quest begins at the sea, the place she comes from and the source of all life.

She takes you on a sensory journey along beaches and cliffs, reporting encounters with seaweed harvesters and saline farmers, and filtering out the plastic soup from her urban life. She invites you to look, listen, smell, feel, taste, and also cut, mash, and mix.

'ZEEMAAL' is an evening full of hope, a connecting dinner where you discover new ways to look at our stormy reality.

New York, early 1970s. South Bronx is ablaze, both literally and metaphorically. The economy is collapsing, buildings stand vacant, gangs roam the streets, and sixty percent of the youth are unemployed. Unable to afford club entry, they take to the streets with sound systems, graffiti, and breakdancing. Their resistance against the establishment evolves into a new culture: hip-hop.

‘HAVOC,’ the new dance performance by performer and theater maker Haider Al Timimi, features a top cast of breakers on stage. With the explosive energy of hip-hop, he examines the power of this revolution. Set to the beats of 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised' by protest poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron, propelled by anger and hope.

Het lijkt alsof ons lichaam nog nooit zo'n prominente plaats heeft gekregen in de manier waarop we naar onszelf en naar de anderen kijken. In het leven van opgroeiende jongeren leidt dat tot kwetsbaarheid, en soms tot ronduit gewelddadig gedrag: racisme, fatshaming, seksisme, pestgedrag. Het gevolg van een blik die mensen reduceert tot een lichaamskenmerk.

'FRAMED' wil die blik bevrijden. Acht performers delen kwetsbare details over de geschiedenis van hun lichaam. Ze tonen hoe uiterlijke kenmerken maar een fractie vertellen over wie iemand écht is. Hun woorden en bewegingen laten een zoektocht naar zelfaanvaarding en trots zien. Dit alles op de live muziek van een exclusief muzikantenduo: Hantrax creëert een aanzwellende clubvibe waarin de groep samenkomt, de trombone van Nabou Claerhout voert naar de emotionele binnenwereld van de performers. 

In 'La montagna è finita' (The mountain is over), the Brussels/Italian theater maker Edoardo Ripani returns to his native region.

Since the end of the Second World War, the Italian Apennines have been plagued by a long period of depression. The last and most dramatic event takes place between August 2016 and January 2017. Three severe earthquakes alter the landscape of the region, which has meanwhile become one of the "forgotten places" in Italy and Europe. The people who remain feel abandoned, and anger flares up.

From a personal perspective, Ripani tells a universal story about the toll of globalization. From natural disasters, depopulation, and economic crises to human and social impoverishment.

With 'Elektra Unbound', NTGent house artist Luanda Casella stages yet another Greek tragedy. Or so we are made to believe. Hunting the part of Elektra, three young auditioners copy women from literary classics, pop culture and social media. Only to reveal their own problematic sense of self.

Guided by ideas of fame and success, and other full-blown delusions, three auditioners go to a mad extent to get the part of Elektra. In ancient Greek tragedy, Elektra is a girl who wants. She wants to avenge her father’s death and everyone will hear her suffering. Sobbing and cursing, cursing and sobbing: Elektra hardly does anything else. She never leaves the doorway.

Similarly, the three auditioners are trapped in a sensational montage of interviews and improvs. As they interpret iconic scenes from The Oresteia, the full trilogy about Elektra and her dysfunctional family, they start to reveal their disastrous own lives. Late-bloomer director Lua and her fierce assistant Lucius, who have a troublesome relationship, never arrive at the point of actually staging Elektra. Is their inability the result of the complex relation we all have with tragedy, or is there more at play? Why is Lua frantically running away? And why do we get the feeling that these auditioners are all deranged?

Inspired by melodrama and social media, 'Elektra Unbound' switches scenes as if the audience would swipe screens. Anything to keep the discomfort on stage easily digestible.

William Basinski - legendary American musician and composer by trade - has been pushing the creative boundaries of his classical training with experimental media for more than 30 years. He uses obsolete technology and analog tape loops to weave enchanting and melancholic soundscapes.  His favorite subjects: the fleetingness of life, memory and the mystery of time.

His magnum opus - the epic 4-disc masterpiece 'The Disintegration Loops' - was showered with praise internationally. Pitchfork ranked it among the top albums of the year in 2004 and praised its 2012 reissue with a rare perfect score of 10. 

Basinski also created a furor with installations and films in collaboration with artist-filmmaker James Elaine, created the music for the opera 'The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic' and is currently touring the world with his latest work 'On Time Out of Time' under his belt. 

The deadly duo of Tim The Caster (Amenra, Every Stranger Looks Like You) and Sigfried Burroughs (Kapitan Korsakov, PAARD., The K.) is sometimes a hip-hop act for a few moments, a finger snap later a grunge band, only to transform into a full-blown sludge/hardcore steamroller.

Under the motto "Great songs are great songs," the gentlemen explore musical genres to their heart's content, without really committing to one style. In doing so, they invariably start from ubertight drums and a bass guitar drenched in reverb coupled with the ability to flip the dynamics mid-song in the blink of an eye.

On Nov. 3, 2023, B R I Q U E V I L L E dropped 'IIII' - their latest exploration into the darkest depths of the soul. The Belgian collective returns to pulsating, repetitive rhythms and piercing guitar work, alongside a more prominent vocal presence. Ethereal melodies and brooding lyrics explore the deeper, richer sonic palette first heard on 2020's 'Quelle'.

Glints is een Belgische rapper en zanger. Hij is lid van het collectief ‘Abattoir Anvers’. Alles, van productie tot artwork en het maken van video's, gebeurt ‘in-house’, door leden van het collectief.

Glints heeft een duidelijk Brits accent, omdat die taal er altijd al was toen hij opgroeide, dankzij zijn Britse tante en neven. Hij maakte vele uitstapjes over de vijver naar Londen, waar hij zijn surrogaatfamilie bezocht, wat resulteerde in zijn kenmerkende Britse toespraak.

Hij groeide op als koorknaap in de opera en is geen alledaagse rapper. Deze achtergrond vormt de basis voor zijn unieke stijl: het samensmelten van grandioze koren en opera-elementen met beats en felle raps.

In 2020 bracht Glints zijn debuutalbum ‘Choirboy’ uit dat hij presenteerde in een uitverkochte AB. Het album werd geproduceerd door zijn beat-broer Yong Yello, eveneens lid van het collectief Abattoir Anvers. De samenwerking resulteerde in succesvolle singles als ‘Bugatti’, ‘Gold Veins’ en ‘Lemonade Money’. Na de release van zijn tweede album ‘THE DARK!’ (met hitsingle ‘Roma’ en samenwerkingen met onder meer Roméo Elvis en DAAN), keert Glints terug met een nieuwe single: ‘Alarm’ ft. Jan Paternoster (The Black Box Openbaring). Politieker dan normaal gaan Glints en Paternoster samen op pad om de noodklok te luiden over de huidige sociale problemen en de vraag te stellen: ‘Waar zijn we in vredesnaam mee bezig?’.

Van YouTube-ster tot wereldster: dat is de weg die de jonge Maisie Peters aan het bewandelen is. Wie houdt haar nog tegen? De Britse singer-songwriter werd opgemerkt door niemand minder dan Ed Sheeran, die haar "de stem van deze generatie" noemt en haar prompt een contract aanbood bij zijn label Gingerbread Man.

Na een reeks van 54 shows als voorprogramma in Sheerans stadiontournee, trok Maisie de wereld rond met haar eigen tour. Die bracht haar afgelopen voorjaar nog naar een compleet uitverkochte Trix in Antwerpen. Intussen heeft de rijzende ster met 'The Good Witch'  (juni 2023) een nieuw album uit, waarmee ze opnieuw op pad trekt.

Two years after the release of his debut EP "Where Do We Begin," Mickael Karkousse is all set to break through. Although it might be a bit weird to talk about a breakthrough with a musician who has more than 20 years and 6 records under his belt as frontman of GOOSE, still one of the biggest Belgian acts of the last millennium.

Karkousse took time in recent years to carefully craft his solo project, scraping and polishing a new, unique sound. If the EP 'Where do we begin' released in 2021 was meandering, poppy nostalgia trip with nod to the '80s, the debut album 'Hello' is a different matter.

Mickael teamed up with producer Victor Le Masne, whose DNA inevitably takes them more in the direction of French pop à la AIR and Daft Punk - complete with hopping bass lines, vocoders and strings. Combine that with the typical rousing build-up of songs that GOOSE made it's reputation with, and you get a finger-licking good album.

MEAU performs small, pure songs about personal growth, love, or just loneliness. Sensitive, danceable, dreamy and catchy at the same time. She has won a special place in the music industry in a short time. In November 2022 she was still performing in De Vooruit's Balzaal, but several tens of millions of streams later she is all set to take the Concertzaal by storm.

Londoner James Holden is an electronic musician with a multi-faceted career spanning two decades. He is a producer, remixer, DJ, synth expert, bandleader, audio engineer, software developer and record label owner. Musically, Holden moves between trance and progressive house to minimal techno, IDM, synth and jazz.

Holden's career began on the commercial side of dance: at the age of nineteen, he released the 12-inch trance classic "Horizons." An international career as a DJ and remixer followed, working with artists such as Madonna, Britney Spears, Radiohead, New Order and Depeche Mode. He also founded his own label Border Community. In 2013, the album "The Inheritors" marked a shift in his career: he stopped DJing and focused on live performances with a modular synth-rig, accompanied by live drums and sax.

Fast forward to 2023: Holden has a solo album out with the ringing title "Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities," a studio collage of rave music. The album is something of a reconciliation with his musical past, combining elements from his 20-year career. Holden describes it as his most open and uncensored record. "It's like a dream of rave, a fantasy about a transformative music culture."

This summer, Belgian rap sensation K1D left behind a trail of flattened festivals. He is all set to continue his victorious tour of the Belgian concert landscape. 

His debut album 'From Belgium With Love', released last year, is a tribute to his homeland describing his and an entire generation's view of Belgian society.

On Jan. 26, the king of the moshpit will transform De Vooruit's Balzaal into the sweatiest club in the country.

The family is barely working. It is the primary source of violence and sexual abuse for queer youths, women, and children. And in simple labour terms, it asks too much of too few. People who take on the brunt of the care labour within families feel overwhelmed, exploited lonely and burned-out.

 Yet the private nuclear household seems to many of us in the west like a law of nature. Inescapable. But, is it? In fact, care responsibilities, that are now seen as self-evidently within the domain of the familiy, have previously lived in large part in the commons. Over several centuries, capitalist societies gradually engineered the privatization of care into individual self-responsible kinship units. This has led to a care scarcity. According to sociologist Melinda Cooper, this ‘familization’ process has been crucial in the rise of both neoconservative and neoliberal forms of economic governance. Familist capitalism exploits the fact that ‘the family’ feels non-negotiable for most people, not to mention indispensable to many marginalized and state-criminalized people’s survival.

Utopian thinkers, including Marx and Engels but also black anti-imperialist feminists in the US, have raised the possibility of ‘abolishing the family’ for over two centuries. Now, after Covid lockdowns showed us how untenable families are under pressure, there is resurgent curiosity around the world about non-capitalist ways of organizing care. What does familism prevent us from doing and desiring? How might we think about bringing an end to organized care scarcity?

After her lecture, Sophie Lewis will talk to writer and gender studies researcher Siggie  Vertommen. Both the talk and the discussion afterward will take place in English. 

This year's edition of Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast will gather conversations about clowning with Micha Goldberg and Geert Belpaeme. Our guests will talk about their experiences around the topic, the similarities and differences in approaches to their artistic practices and reveal sources of inspiration, from movies to books and scientific research. With a pastry and coffee in hand, we will delve deeper into the how and why of their work. 

Guests are Geert Belpaeme, Micha Goldberg, Rosmary Velasquez, Giulia Piana & Castélie Yalombo.

Moderation by Valentina Barone