Founded in 1994, Kunstenfestivaldesarts (KFDA) is Brussels’ annual citywide celebration of international contemporary performance. Renowned for its boundary-defying programming and radical hospitality, the festival transforms public and theatrical spaces into temporary laboratories for experiment and encounter. The 2025 edition, running May 9–31, continues to position Brussels as a global site of critical performance discourse.
This year’s edition was curated by KFDA’s artistic team, Daniel Blanga Gubbay and Dries Douibi, working in close dialogue with international artists whose practices sit at the intersection of poetics and politics. Rather than curating around a singular theme, the festival constructs a field of inquiry where works echo, clash, and expand each other. In 2025, many works attend to questions of language, refusal, transmission, and the conditions of collective life.
Featured Works Section:
Mette Ingvartsen – Delirious Night
Mette Ingvartsen – “Delirious Night”
Performed by nine dancers and accompanied by live percussion from Will Guthrie, “Delirious Night” is a choreographic homage to ecstatic states and altered perception. Drawing from historic and contemporary trance practices—from medieval dance manias to masked balls and techno nights—Ingvartsen creates a communal field of motion where pleasure and ritual overlap. The stage transforms into a flickering arena of repetition, rhythm, and exhaustion, challenging the separation between performer and spectator. This work proposes dancing together as a political and erotic strategy of transformation. Ingvartsen continues her investigation of collective energy as both performance material and social force. Photo: Bea Borgers
Venue: Cultuurcentrum De Factorij
Dates: May 16–18
More Info
Alex Baczyński‑Jenkins – Malign Junction (Goodbye Berlin)
Alex Baczyński‑Jenkins – “Malign Junction (Goodbye Berlin)”
“Malign Junction (Goodbye Berlin)” is a new work by Baczyński‑Jenkins that explores queer intimacy, slow temporality, and choreography as a space of negotiation. The piece brings bodies into suspended contact, touching, pausing, and vibrating with subtle gestures that echo through the space. Berlin becomes a ghost in the room, conjured through references to queer nightlife, displacement, and grief. Baczyński‑Jenkins doesn’t stage a spectacle but cultivates a field of presence, where movement is porous and meaning shared in glances, breath, and proximity. It is a farewell not through nostalgia, but through presence. Photo: Spyros Rennt
Venue: Ultima Vez – house for contemporary dance
Dates: May 14–17
More Info
Miet Warlop – Inhale Delirium Exhale
Miet Warlop – “Inhale Delirium Exhale”
Known for her ecstatic installations and high-impact visual work, Miet Warlop returns with “Inhale Delirium Exhale,” a performance-sculpture hybrid that engulfs the stage in 6,500 meters of fabric, movement, and live music. Inspired by the tension between the inner chaos of artistic creation and the outward performance of composure, Warlop collaborates with DEEWEE to build an immersive sonic and visual storm. The piece is a ritual of collapse and accumulation, where human figures are caught in webs of shifting material. Bodies drag, dance, and resist, choreographed into a score of saturation. It is both ecstatic and meditative, explosive and controlled. Photo: Reinout Hiel
Venue: Les Halles de Schaerbeek
Dates: May 18–21
More Info
Lia Rodrigues – Borda
Lia Rodrigues – “Borda”
Brazilian choreographer Lia Rodrigues stages “Borda,” a performance where fragility and collectivity form the core of survival. A group of performers builds and dissolves precarious landscapes from cheap materials: colored fabrics, rope, plastic. The choreography emerges from communal labor, ritual action, and attentiveness to each other. The border of the stage is a porous membrane, between bodies, between stories, between what can and cannot be contained. As in Rodrigues’ prior work, care and resistance become tools of movement, drawing attention to the socio-political context of Brazil and the global precarity of the present. “Borda” is not spectacle; it is survival. Photo: Sammi Landweer
Venue: Théâtre National
Dates: May 28–31
More Info
Alberto Cortés – Analphabet
Alberto Cortés – “Analphabet”
With a ghost as narrator and a violinist as accomplice, “Analphabet” is an unclassifiable work that defies theatrical norms. Alberto Cortés crafts a space where language disintegrates into sound, memory, and unresolved tension. Standing before a lit screen, Cortés questions the hierarchies of communication, mocking rationality while making room for poetry, sex, and ghosts. Luz Prado’s live violin weaves around the monologue, sometimes breaking it, sometimes underlining it. The piece is intimate, funny, irreverent, and utterly serious in its desire to unlearn. If knowledge is power, Cortés insists, then unknowing might be freedom.
Venue: Théâtre Les Tanneurs
Dates: May 9–12
More Info
Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2025 continues its commitment to decentering dominant cultural narratives through works that are formally innovative, politically urgent, and deeply intimate. From ecstatic dance to queer slowness, from fabric as resistance to ghosts who speak in music, this year’s edition foregrounds performance as a mode of life-making and world-unbuilding.
In addition to its core program, KFDA offers a constellation of public gatherings including Free School workshops, the Nightlife series of live music and DJ sets, and Plat(e)form(e) 2025, an international visitors program and discursive space. Each thread offers opportunities for artists and audiences to meet outside of formal performance, expanding the festival’s space of action beyond the stage.
For more information and to explore the full program, visit the Kunstenfestivaldesarts official website.
