KVS
The KVS is a city theatre in Brussels, a cosmopolitan and multilingual city. The KVS works with and for the city, which it sees as a laboratory for tomorrow’s society, where people will live together without necessarily sharing a past, only a future. How can one nevertheless portray shared histories in such a divided city? How can one make a theatre like this a symbolic place for everyone in the city? These are the main questions in the multifaceted and inclusive artistic work of the KVS.
Which explains why you will find not only spoken theatre there, but also theatre without words, and music and dance, established artists and absolute beginners, avant-garde alongside popular work, in and outside the theatre itself. It explains why such topics as poverty and exclusion force their way into the programming, as well as colonial history (or its suppression) and the difficulty of dealing with Flanders’ own artistic heritage and other matters of identity.
It also explains why reciprocal cooperation has been established in places that help define Brussels: the Congo and Palestine, places where the violence of history is still raging. But whereas in Brussels we often have to struggle to reconnect the arts with the social sphere, elsewhere it is essential to liberate art from social oppression. In this way the KVS does what is necessary, both here and elsewhere, without dogma.
As of: September 2015