Info

Kunstenpunt and het TheaterFestival are launching a second edition of the Industry Reflection Days, the successor to the Sector Day. This year, with a focus on the upcoming structural subsidy round, we are highlighting inspiring practices and methodologies that can strengthen the future of our arts landscape. Good practices that can contribute something transversal to the performing arts sector.

Together with the sector, we searched for inspiring or leading practices within one or more of the five functions defined by the Arts Decree, which serve as the basis for applying for project or structural funding: development, production, presentation, participation, and reflection + education. We looked for practices that question, rethink, expand, or challenge the boundaries and interpretation of these functions toward 2035. We invited practices, we will offer a programme from workshops to think tanks and knowledge sharing. Most sessions will run in parallel, the idea is that you as a team can follow the sessions in parallel and exchange about the content during the breaks. Sign up and let’s have a day of inspiring imagination together!

Following the sector day, we will award the sector prizes at 18h in NTGent. You are cordially invited to celebrate the sector with us.

10:40 - 12:00 | Keynote — Workshop IPOP

Feedback is a form of conversation. It facilitates mutual learning, frames critique, and generates valuable insights into artistic creations and their resonances. In this keynote talk, In Pursuit of Otherwise Possibilities (IPOP) will share insights and methodologies developed over three-years of research into queering artistic feedback. We will examine our needs-based feedback protocol and share the queer values, theories, and histories that have guided our research. Our aim is to provide useful questions and effective techniques to support cultural and educational institutions in developing feedback modalities that work for their community and context. Working, within an intersectional frame we will ask, how can queer principles and lived experiences be utilized to support marginalized artists? How can feedback cultivate more effective, inclusive, and liberatory artistic institutions and communities? What do we mean by “good” art and feedback and how can we begin to ask these questions collectively across hierarchies of teacher-student, programmer-artist, and funder-applicant?

IPOP’s approach to feedback has been contextualized in two publications, “Queering Artistic Feedback” (2022) and newly released “A Queer Feedback Handbook. Experiments in Otherwise Education” (2025).

BIO IPOP

Elioa Steffen (she/they, US/NL) is an artist working in performance, writing, and social practice. They explore communal narratives, cultural norms, and systemic violence, and are co-founder of the queer pedagogical platform IPOP.

Szymon Adamczak (he/him, PL/NL) is a dramaturg, writer, and maker. His work combines poetry, social engagement, and queer activism, with a particular focus on HIV culture and non-professional performers.

13:00 - 16:00 | Education — The Future of (Higher) Art Education

What does the art education of the future look like? What practices inspire us today, and how can we together develop sustainable strategies for tomorrow? Where are the needs, and unexplored dreams and opportunities for the higher art education of the future?

In a stimulating panel discussion, we let the imagination do the talking: Hicham Khalidi (Jan Van Eyck Academy), Krystel Khoury (ISAC), Sebastiàn Belmar (Choreographer & freelance educator) and Inge Lattre (Platform-K) take us through their personal and professional visions. Each of them will read their vision of the future – short, powerful and inspiring. Afterwards, they enter into conversation with each other, under the moderation of artist Barbara T’Jonck. The audience – makers, students, lecturers, policymakers, the curious – will also be actively involved in this collective moment of thought and imagination.

Will you come and help build the higher art education of the future?

BIO Hicham Khalidi
Hicham Khalidi has been the director of the Jan van Eyck Academie since 2018 and curated, among other things, the Dutch entry for the Venice Biennale 2024. His work focuses on collaboration and context.

BIO Krystel Khoury
Krystel Khoury (she/her) is a performing arts researcher and dramaturge from Beirut. She explores embodied knowledge, body politics, and artistic collaboration. Since 2019, she has led ISAC (ArBa-Esa) in Brussels and works with Mophradat.

BIO Sebastiàn Belmar
Since 2000, he has worked internationally as a performer, choreographer, and dramaturge. With a background in architecture and circus, he explores the relationship between body and space through transdisciplinary creation and education.

BIO Barbara T’Jonck
Barbara T’Jonck is a theatre maker, performer, and artistic researcher. She creates in situ work, explores collective rural longing, and co-founded Platform In De Maak for emerging artists and democratic creation processes.

13:00 - 16:00 | Development — Posture of Liquidity by Jija Sohn & wpZimmer

How can we nourish spaces that support thriving and fulfillment instead of stress and anxiety in the often-overlooked moments, unseen labour in an artistic practice? How to cultivate ease and resonance in moments of application writing, administration, meetings, relation building?

In this session, we invite you to step into a posture of liquidity—a state of flow where time moves fluidly and everything is in motion: sensations, thoughts, emotions, and relationships. For this we draw on Jija’s artistic practice that is deeply inspired by water. For her, water represents an intimate, self-reflective space—one that invites us to soften, to listen, and to be changed.

We will focus on questions such as: How can we set aside our roles, titles, and positions—not just to exchange opportunities, but to truly connect and understand one another, to foster reciprocity? Where, in the rat race of our daily work, do we find room for openness—for being surprised?

Throughout the session, we will explore these questions both physically and verbally. With movement, dialogue and shared presence, we will attune to the potential that is already there but stays often unnoticed because of stress. This session offers a moment to pause. To release. To make space for new perspectives, unexpected connections, and perhaps a different way of looking at our daily practices and habits.

BIO Jija Sohn

Jija Sohn is a Japanese-Korean artist based in Amsterdam. Her work focuses on well-being, connection, and community, with projects in Europe and Japan. She explores movement in water as an artistic territory.

13:00 - 16:00 | Production — Domestic Anarchi by Andrea Zavala Folache & Adriano Wilfert Jensen

How can care, collaboration, and co-existence reshape the way we make and share dance?

In this workshop, choreographers Andrea and Adriano open up their ongoing project—a performance and research practice shaped by co-parenting, temporary co-habitations and concerns about the capitalist, sexist and colonial scripts that tend to play out when a child enters the scene. Working with one person at a time in their local context, and through dance as an expanded set of tools for sensing and making sense together, they try to prefigure another mode of international collaboration.

Through embodied exercises, collective reflection, and shared decision-making, participants are invited into a process that centers lived experience, non-normative production models, and the entanglement of life and art. The workshop offers insights into a pluriversal dramaturgy that resists the spectacle and instead makes space for invisible, imagined, and deeply situated dances.

Since in a way we already know that the care administered through “family” (“nuclear”, “chosen”, “national”…) is care privatized, what de(con)structions, accumulations, collisions and (dis)arrangements of “family” allow us to sense and make sense of other, non-privatized, transversal, dissident ways for organising care?

Open to artists, people with care responsibilities, and all those interested in relational, sustainable, and radical approaches to performance-making.

BIO Andrea Zavala Folache & Adriano Wilfert Jensen

Andrea Zavala Folache and Adriano Wilfert Jensen collaborate as artists and parents. Through dance, they explore care, solidarity, and knowledge exchange beyond traditional notions of family. Since 2021, their practices have been closely intertwined.

13:00 - 16:00 | Presentation — (Re)presentation, responsibility, mobility, and access within international programming by Sens Interdits

This workshop, rooted in the presentation of the organization Sens Interdits, invites participants to explore the complexities of presenting international artists in today’s cultural landscape. Drawing from the festival’s commitment to fostering intercultural dialogue through contemporary performance, the session will center on a critical question: What does it truly mean to present international artists today, and what are the ethical, logistical, and curatorial implications involved?

Through their long experiances, open discussion, and collaborative inquiry, participants will examine themes such as cultural representation, institutional responsibility, mobility and access, and the shifting dynamics of global artistic exchange.

BIO Sens Interdits

Sens Interdits promotes international performing arts through a theatre biennial, tours, and publications. They strive for diversity, resistance, and exchange, despite mobility restrictions and global challenges. One team member will lead the workshop.

13:00 - 16:00 | Participation — The Future of Community Spaces by FATSABBATS

This space does not offer fixed answers, but rather a space for reflection,
Centered around practices of community care.
What do we wish to change in our practices? In our organizations? In our know-how? In our economies?
How do we move beyond intention and theory?
How do we transform our practices? Enable shifts in states of being?
How do we receive people? artist ? staff ?how do we treat ourselves ?
How do we form collective groups within the cultural sector—and bring in less normative practices?
What do we choose to value?
How do we pass things on? And why?
What do we wish to enable?
How can we rethink dynamics and offer evolving, transformative spaces?
How can we build a relationship with our audiences?

How can we generate offerings based on the actual needs of ours audiences ?
These are some of the many questions that FATSABBATS has sought to explore and experiment with—
Questions that will serve as the foundation for our time of gathering and collective practice.

BIO Ophélie Mac Coco

Ophélie Mac Coco is a performer, educator, and founder of FATSABBATS, working at the intersection of decolonial utopias, mental health, and community care for racialized LGBTQIA+ communities in Brussels.

13:00 - 16:00 | Reflection — Dissonance in the Arts and Collective Reflection by Douwe Haenen

Maggie Nelson writes in On Freedom that freedom does not lie in avoiding conflict, but in tolerating ambivalence. Freedom is not a comfort zone. It is the ability to remain in disharmony without immediately trying to fix or push it away. Resting in disharmony creates harmony. In the cultural sector, we like to talk about knowledge sharing and participation. About making space for other voices, for the public, for plurality. About how important it is to engage in dialogue. We all believe that. And yet, we often recoil when it actually happens—when someone breaks the structure, strikes the wrong tone, says something that rubs the wrong way. We claim to be open to interaction, but only when it remains controlled.

This tension, this split between what we say and what we do, is what American psychologist Leon Festinger in 1957 called cognitive dissonance: the discomfort that arises when belief and behavior are out of sync. During this working session, we will search for the dissonant tones within the arts sector and collectively build an attitude that finds calm in disharmony.

It is an invitation to collectively reflect on the function of reflection itself: how do we want to shape this in the future? Which established values deserve to be questioned? How can we embody collective knowledge sharing differently?

BIO Douwe Haenen

Douwe Haenen is a program maker and heritage professional. During his studies at the Reinwardt Academy, he focused on ethical issues within the cultural sector. He has worked with and advised organizations such as deBuren, the Bonnefantenmuseum, OSCAM, and SHCL. He is currently a program maker at Curieus, where he remains committed to promoting accessibility and participation in the cultural sector. Additionally, he is involved with the Brussels-based collective Matinée.

13:00 - 16:00 | Artistic Table — What Is Relevant Work Today and Who Decides That? By detheatermaker

What is relevant work, and who decides that? With an eye on new project grant applications, we are turning – six days before the deadline – to question six of the dossier: the relevance of the initiative for the discipline or the arts landscape.

When is stage work relevant? How does that relevance relate to hypes, and how can one move beyond such hypes in the sector? During the sector day, De Resonanten of detheatermaker (Tristan Feyten, Sezen Atmaca, and Rodrigo Batista) will engage in conversation with Jonas Baeke and Tine Van Aerschot about the role of relevance in their practice. Together, we will search for an answer to the infamous sixth question, ranging from classical approaches to the (necessary) alternatives.

BIO Jonas Baeke

Jonas Baeke (Ghent, 1999) is an actor and director. He graduated in 2022 from KASK & Conservatorium with the performance Pinokkio, created together with Jef Hellemans, which was shown at, among others, TAZ. Pinokkio also received the acting award of De Acteursgilde. Together with Mats Vandroogenbroeck, Jonas created Bambiraptor at Kopergietery, which was selected for Het Theaterfestival 2022. In May 2024, their new performance Infinity Forever premiered, also selected for Het Theaterfestival. Jonas won the TAZ and Sabam creation grant, with which he created the family performance Mr. Beam in October 2023, together with Lucas Van Der Vegt. In 2026, he will create the movement piece Beep Street. Recurring themes in his work are alienation, slapstick, and the shortcomings of language.

BIO Tine Van Aerschot

Tine Van Aerschot is a person with a sexual orientation, with a gender preference, with a color, with an origin, with a cultural background, with a mental and a physical condition, with an age, with a voice among voices, with an opinion among opinions. She is a person with opportunities and possibilities, with the privileges of someone raised in the white Western middle class. She profiles herself as an artist, theater maker, teacher, feminist, thinker, and as a human being. For 35 years she has been trying to communicate as clearly as possible with different audiences. She does this through various media and uses both image and text, creating performances, posters, booklets. She knows her way around the internet and has built a large network in Belgium and beyond. As a teacher, she shares her experience and knowledge with young artists, with the new generation. Today she wants to help give visibility to thoughts and opinions that do not automatically reach her. She wants to seek out voices that go unheard. She wants to help strengthen the resilience of those who need it.

BIO detheatermaker / De Resonanten

detheatermaker is a nomadic development and production platform for emerging makers taking their first steps into the professional performing arts field. On this sector day, you will get to know De Resonanten, the artistic sounding board group of detheatermaker, consisting of hybrid makers with an interest in organizing, curating, and mentoring artists. De Resonanten reflect on the artistic and strategic choices of the organization and provide artistic input and feedback to detheatermaker’s artists. In addition, they curate and organize encounters and participate in prospecting. At present, the group consists of: Sezen Atmaca (Kunstenpunt), Rodrigo Batista (theater maker, performer), and Tristan Feyten (theater maker, performer).