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Can you feel it?

Marketplace 76 is a multilingual emotional frenzy – just remember, none of it’s real
© Maarten Vanden Abeele

Jan Lauwers, renowned theatre maker and co-founder of the Brussels-based Needcompany theatre group, takes his job very seriously. “I think every play should have a good conflict and a good catharsis,” he says. You will find his latest work, Marketplace 76, which plays the Kaaitheater in Brussels this month, packed full of both, from incest, rape and suicide to promiscuity, salvation and love.

This musical play of four acts opens at the one-year anniversary of a terrible tragedy that killed 24 people of a sleepy Belgian village. Told through acting, dance and song and based on a stunning original score by composers Hans Petter Dahl, Maarten Seghers and Rombout Willems, we follow 11 hapless villagers over the course of four seasons as they confront their ongoing grief while dealing with a string of further horrors that Lauwers throws across their paths.

Katy Desmond
(October 17, 2012)

Familiar face

Flemish actor Peter Van den Begin reprises his most glamorous role

Even if you don’t watch much television or rarely walk into a cinema, you must have seen his face before. It has a look that is, quite simply, hard to forget. And this year Flemish actor Peter Van den Begin has been on the front page of every magazine, in the pages of every newspaper and on billboards across the region.

The 47-year-old writer and actor, once described by the magazine Humo as “servant of the natural, driven towards truth”, is more in demand than ever before. Last spring, his role as a stubborn, smalltown butcher in Allez Eddy! won plaudits, and this summer he shot the new comedy Frits en Franky – a follow-up to the hugely popular 2010 movie Frits en Freddy. He also co-starred in the Belgian film La cinquième saison (The Fifth Season), much-applauded at the Venice Film Festival last month.

Daan Bauwens
(October 9, 2012)

Bozar Book Club goes English

Brussels Fine Arts Centre Bozar has launched an English-language Book Club next to its existing Dutch and French clubs. Participants read the selected book, then get together with the moderator to discuss them. There’s quite a crowd, so even if you want to keep quiet, you’re invited to come along.

The moderator for the English section is author Lila Azam Zanganeh, who cut her teeth last season running the French-language section. Azam Zanganeh is French-Iranian, lives in New York and has taught both literature and film at Harvard. Her first choice for the Book Club is the selected poems of Adonis, who, she says, “single-handedly launched a revolution in modern Middle Eastern poetry”. Adonis will be discussed on 27 November, so you have plenty of time to get the book (available, quite conveniently, at the Bozar shop) and be prepared.

Lisa Bradshaw
(October 3, 2012)

Another world

Marnix Peeters’ debut novel is the adrenaline boost Flemish fiction has been waiting for
© Koen Broos

Marnix Peeters’ philosophy in life as well as in fiction is to go with the flow. He started working for radio station Studio Brussel and soon became a rock journalist at the weekly Humo, interviewing some of the top musicians in the business, before he eventually landed a job as an editor at Het Laatste Nieuws. Tired of the deadlines and crazy hours, Peeters decided to turn over a new leaf.

“I quit my job at Het Laatste Nieuws three years ago,” the author says, “and just started making stuff up. I wanted to challenge myself, so I created alluring opening lines, lines that gave me carte blanche to make the wackiest story possible.”

Rebecca Benoot
(October 3, 2012)

Sweet sorrow

The adaptation of Johan Heldenbergh’s hugely popular stage play opens the Flanders International Film Festival

“You can’t share grief,” says Johan Heldenbergh, which is the theme at the heart of The Broken Circle Breakdown, the actor’s 2008 play now made into a movie by Felix Van Groeningen. It opens the 39th edition of the Flanders International Film Festival.

Elise and Didier are not much alike. She’s a vegetarian tattoo artist with a spiritual bent; he’s an atheist cowboy living in a caravan. But when Elise sees Didier’s sweating brow fronting a bluegrass band, and he gets a tour of the tattoos covering her body, it’s love.

Lisa Bradshaw
(October 3, 2012)

A constant yearning

An exhibition at Gaasbeek Castle explores the mysterious essence of sehnsucht

The castle of Gaasbeek in Flemish Brabant was originally a fortress of the dukes of Brabant, but the building as we now know it is essentially the romantic creation of a French marquise, Marie Peyrat, widow of Giammartino Arconati-Visconti, whose family had owned the castle since the end of the 18th century.

Following damage caused in the Napoleonic period, Peyrat employed artists and designers from across Europe to convert the castle into an idealised version of a medieval palace – a sort of theatre of history. Marie donated the castle to the Belgian state in 1921, and in 1980 it became a museum of the Flemish Community.

Alan Hope
(September 26, 2012)

The son of surrealism

With his new album Future Vintage, Arno has surpassed himself
© Danny Willems

Arno, like Elvis, can do without a surname, but if you’ve ever wondered: It’s Hintjens. The 63-year old singer was born and bred in Ostend, but has been living in the centre of Brussels for decades, where you can see him sipping a coffee on a summer morning in a café or drinking something stronger late at night in the famous art deco jazz club L’Archiduc.

Arno is not only the most highly praised Flemish rock singer, he’s also easily surpassing the language barrier. In his very unique style, combining English with French (and on very rare occasions his Ostend patois), he’s as popular in Flanders as in the French Community. No one sings like Arno, no one thinks like Arno and, certainly, no one speaks like Arno.

Christophe Verbiest
(September 19, 2012)

Face of Flanders

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui
© Chris Van Der Burght/Eastman

The dancer and choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui was recently awarded this year’s Flemish Culture Prize for stage arts – prompting one newspaper to welcome the award as a sign that Flanders is finally catching up with the rest of the world in recognising his talent.

Cherkaoui was born in Antwerp, the son of a Flemish mother and a Moroccan father. He says his first influence was watching a friend copy the movements of Kate Bush in her iconic Wuthering Heights video – he also cites her song “Running Up That Hill” as the music he would choose for the soundtrack of his life.

Alan Hope
(September 12, 2012)

Only human

The region-wide Visual Arts Flanders comes to a close with the assured Newtopia in Mechelen
© L Hermann

Newtopia: The State of Human Rights, a city-wide exhibition in Mechelen, approaches its vast subject from a wide variety of angles while remaining remarkably cohesive and riveting. It’s a triumph for Brussels curator Katerina Gregos, fresh off her stint at Manifesta

They say all good things must come to an end and sadly, cult ure lovers, this is true of Visual Arts Flanders, the no-frills umbrella title for five rather thrilling art exhibitions showing across the region. It all began in March with the coastal parcours Beaufort 04 (ends 30 September) and continued with Ghent’s city-wide arts event Track (ends 16 September), the reopening of the Middelheim Museum in Antwerp (ongoing) and the first-ever Belgian edition of Manifesta in Genk (ends 30 September).

Tamara Gausi
(September 12, 2012)

Sand, surf and spiders

Patrice Toye’s new feature opens the Ostend Film Festival
Pregnant and hidden: Little Black Spiders is based on actual occurrences

A few people in Ostend are praying for rain this weekend, because nothing kills a good film festival in Flanders like balmy weather. Though that’s a rather appropriate temperature to view Flemish director Patrice Toye’s atmospheric Little Black Spiders, where teenage girls loll about the forest, napping, sharing stories and playing games. It sounds idyllic, but, much like Toye’s last feature, (N)iemand, paradise isn’t always what it seems.

In Little Black Spiders, which opens the Ostend Film Festival this Friday night, 16-year-old Katja (a wonderful Line Pillet) is driven to a castle-like estate in the middle of the Flemish countryside. She climbs a very long fire escape to reach the attic, where a number of other girls are living.

Lisa Bradshaw
(September 5, 2012)