Playground Live Arts Festival: 19th edition

For its 19th edition, M Leuven and STUK, House for Dance, Image & Sound, join forces once again to present the international performance festival Playground. Each year, this unique arts festival offers a platform to artists working at the intersection of performing and visual arts. The programme is a blend of performance, installation, film, behavioural experiment and choreography. Staying true to its spirit of experimentation, Playground invites artists to explore new forms and create works that reflect on art and society. Often premieres, always unexpected.

This year’s programme
Isaac Chong Wai reverses movements of falling as a powerful response to institutional violence and assaults against individuals of Asian descent. Michael Portnoy invites you into an immersive, collective hallucination of gestures — part nightclub, part laboratory of the absurd. Alkis Hadjiandreou, Julie Laporte, and Myriam Lefkowitz explore collective listening as a new form of closeness beyond physical distance, where the audience becomes the destination for a dance transmitted from afar. Meanwhile, Zhana Ivanova’s performance unfolds as a game of interpretation and improvisation, revealing a visible tension between what is intended, what is imagined, and what actually happens.

Inspired by a painting from the ‘Collection of M’, Ana Mazzei creates sculptures that act as both actor and scenography, inviting physical engagement. Alicja Kwade sets you spinning in search of knowledge and meaning. Drawing from the gestures of M’s depot manager, Grace Schwindt develops a movement language that questions dominant power structures through care.

By using hesitations, repetitions, and fragments, Ode de Kort unfolds an absurd, poetic play in which language is constantly shifting. Charlotte Bouckaert stages a dialogue between the viewer and an invisible performer, reflecting on how images are formed. Karel van Laere presents both a video installation and a live performance, probing the body’s vulnerability in a mechanized world, while Ferenc Balcaen examines melancholy as both an aesthetic and existential state in an installation and a one-on-one talk.

This year’s edition also features a public conversation by Kunstenpunt on performance art in Flanders, organized as part of the preparation for a new field sketch on the topic.

Curators: Eva Wittocx (M), Lore Boon (M), Steven Vandervelden (STUK)

Discover the full programme at playgroundfestival.be.

For press inquiries, please contact: STUK, pers@stuk.be; M, persm@mleuven.be

Playground is a collaboration between M and STUK.