Igor Stravinsky

Donnerstag (Thursday), the first opera of the Licht (Light) cycle, to which Karlheinz Stockhausen devoted twenty-five years of his life, is the day of Archangel Michael, his youth, journey around the earth and his return. It is also an autobiographical moment in time, overwhelmingly so, in a spiral that leads to the stars and the harmony of the universe.

In collaboration with the choreographer and dancer Radouan Mriziga, the challenge taken up by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker is to make Vivaldi's Four Seasons heard, using the tools of dance to hone the way we listen to this baroque masterpiece. Under the auspices of abstraction, the resulting alliance reconnects with the imaginary ecological world that is conjured up by this famous concerto.

We find ourselves in the company of major figures of European Body Art (Joseph Beuys, Orlan, Marina Abramović, to name a few) via their accounts of exhibitions and public scarifications dating back to the 1970s. In parallel with this runs the true story of a killing spree carried out by a Lebanese office at his workplace, and the fluctuating motivations for his acts.

At the crossroads between musical and documentary, Lola Arias brings us a choral composition in which six female former inmates talk about their lives during and after incarceration. Their six intertwining destinies raise questions about the various forms of violence present in contemporary society, whilst exploring the margins of fiction and reality at the same time.

The hero of this new work by Robert Wilson is Fernando Pessoa. And a paradoxical hero at that. The Portuguese poet spent his life 'multiplying himself', inventing heteronyms, or fictitious authors, to whom he attributed works he himself wrote. He even went as far as to invent relationships, either amicable ones or from master to disciple, between his different avatars.

In this breakthrough piece for Jan Martens, VOICE NOISE brings together six dancers to shape a soundscape comprising some of the great female performers and composers of our time. In his own pop-inspired and precise way, the choreographer questions a very contemporary story, and in doing so raises the question of how some of these voices were silenced.