What the Brussels festival hopes to achieve with this strange-ness is a little less clear. "We endeavour to show performances that suggest a strong inner world," explains Patrick Bonté, the festival's director. "We are very attentive to creators working on a language and structure."

This year in particular, he sought performances with "strangeness as a point of view for understanding the world. What's important for me is that the artists we invite speak the language of today. What they suggest is not a mirror of the world but a reinterpretation of the world."

The festival is both the opening and the closing of the art centre's season. With the departure of artistic director Monique Duren this past June, the institution that launched 12 years ago remains a bit in flux, awaiting the arrival of a new director to both give it a direction and to develop the programming for the coming year. In that way, this year's festival is perhaps also strange in that it anticipates a season's programming that does not yet exist.

Les Brigittines itself is formally called the Brussels Contemporary Art Centre for Movement and Voice. It is exactly these qualities that you can expect to experience at the festival. But both the centre and the festival pride themselves on highlighting artists who blur the boundaries between dance and theatre.

This year's festival is scheduled in such a way that some evenings will see a clear thread through the different performances. Two Belgian companies - Compagnie Mossoux-Bonté and Abattoir Fermé - tackle nightmarish situations in Kefar Nahum and Mythobarbital. Another evening will see the Danish Kitt Johnson and the Italian pathosformel studying and toying with skeletons.

"Often the artists don't know exactly if they are dancing or performing theatre," notes Bonté. "They mix media because their universe needs to use these different media." This is clearly a festival that thinks outside the box.

The box itself - that is, the theatre - plays its own role in the festival. The 17th-century mansion was converted into a church by the Brigittine order not long after being built in the Marollen district, and one still strongly feels that purpose in the performance space. Take out the seating and lighting, and you are still clearly in a church - from the slightly chilly humidity, to the bare brick walls, to the resonant acoustics.

The building is special in other ways; Bonté calls it a "hybrid" space, having worked there both as the festival director and as a director with his own Brussels theatre-meets-dance company, Compagnie Moussoux-Bonté. "You are kind of in a bubble," he says. "But you can hear the trains and the ambulances. Real life is present, but at the same time you are in another world."

From a theatrical perspective, the chapel presents certain challenges - including a mere nine-meter breadth that virtually eliminates any wing space. Each production must be workable in this eccentric space and must be able to load in and out quickly to accommodate the breakneck pacing of seven chapel productions within the festival's two weeks.

A further four productions take place in the Brigittines' secondary space in the newer half of the building: an intriguing steel-and-glass double of the Brigittines chapel. Completed in 2007 by Italian architect Andrea Bruno, it mirrors the older building in its outline and volume, while attempting to bring the chapel in line with its more modern surroundings.

The striking newer structure houses two additional smaller performance or exhibition spaces, as well as the offices of the arts centre. The contrast of the two buildings side by side is eye-catching and successfully achieves the architect's objectives.

Les Brigittines aims to cram as many people as possible into these various spaces through the duration of the festival. They want the festival to be accessible, and in the past they have sold out many performances to a mix of people from across Belgium and beyond.

The festival is international but includes Belgian artists every year. Bonté emphasizes the importance of linking works across borders, allowing productions to share a dialogue with one another. Belgium, he say, is a "schizophrenic world - two languages, two cultures - and Brussels is at the heart of that mixed ambiance. Maybe that's the reason why we go between the disciplines so easily."

1-3 September
Korte Brigittinenstraat
Brussels

www.brigittines.be