The Kunstenfestivaldesarts

The Kunstenfestivaldesarts (KFDA), a international festival for contemporary performing arts in Brussels, has been known for taking strong artistic and political stances since it was founded in 1994 by Frie Leysen and Guido Minne. Its first big bet? Being resolutely bicommunal, as its name combining Dutch and French attests. Belgium is a country divided between two linguistic communities: those who speak Flemish and and those who are francophone. The divides between the two are notoriously strong, even in the arts: each has distinct cultural policies, institutions, and ways of working. So to create a festival at the crossroads of these two worlds, even in contry’s bilingual capital where street signs feature the two languages, was an audacious challenge. 

The event, produced annually since 2000, has always been international and multi-disciplinary – bringing together dance, performance, theatre, visual arts, and cinema. It also rapidly became one of Europe’s major cultural festivals, rising to the ranks of the prestigious Festival d’Avignon and the Wiener Festwochen in Vienna, and boosting Brussel’s reputation as a cosmopolitan melting pot at the heart of Europe. Another of KFDA’s signatures? Eschewing themes, preferring instead to be open to whatever the artists they’re working with propose.“A festival is never an autonomous entity: it is porous, and reacts to its environment,” says Daniel Blanga Gubbay, who has co-directed KFDA alongside Dries Douibi since 2018. That porosity is the true DNA of the festival, which has seen major evolutions in the political context and the cultural landscape over its 30 years of existence. 

In the 1990’s, few cultural venues in Brussels programmed work by foreign artists, a trend which KFDA helped reverse. In addition to showcasing national names such as Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Wim Vandekeybus, Grace Ellen Barkey, or Thierry De Mey, KFDA invited creators from across the globe, such as American choreographer Merce Cunningham and Johannesburg-based talent William Kentridge, to lesser known creators from Taipei, Cracow, Turin, or Hong Kong. Though many of the city’s venues have followed suit, the festival has remained cutting-edge by continuing to seek out new work by artists from contexts that are rarely centered on stages in the West. This makes the festival’s program “complementary to, not in competition with, what is already programmed,” elsewhere in Brussels, says Blanga Gubbay, who insists upon the necessity of constantly refining KFDA’s offering in an ever-changing environment. 

He’s quick to point out that the performing arts landscape – and the world at large – has become much more international over the last thirty years. “We’re increasingly connected, and overwhelmed by narratives from other contexts.” The rise of globalization has shifted the way the team approaches bringing in work from other countries, with a focus on substance, complexity and turning stereotypes on their head.

It’s an approach that has established long-standing loyalties between the festival and international artists. The 2025 edition will feature a revival of Faustus in Africa! by the South African Handspring Puppet Company, a work by Willliam Kentridge programmed by KFDA s almost 30 years ago.; Marrakech-born artist Radouan Mriziga – who presented Il Cimento dell’Armonia e dell’Inventione in collaobration with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker in 2024 – returns with a new work titled Magec / The Desert. And New York choreographer Trajal Harrell will present his experimental work-in-progress Welcome to Asbestos Hall after having previously presented a number of large-scale works at the festival.

It took the choreographer many weeks to create this workbook. It begins by describing the various narrative sequences, peppered with ideas for movement. “I had to express myself through images, through allusions that would be striking shortcuts to the action”. And this action, as she explains in her book, is “built through by a logical progression in the atmosphere of the piece which matches the variations.”

Though the KFDA supports radical artistic experimentation, they’re also careful to consider the question of audience accessibility to the works they program. “The idea that we should dial down the complexity of the pieces we program or present ‘easier’ pieces in order to reach a wider audience seems paternalistic and fake to us,” says Douibi. As to whether some might not feel equipped to fully understand certain artworks, the co-directors respond by saying that “often we find ourselves in a room where everyone feels lost.” Accepting to get lost together, and even enjoying being lost together, is a definition that is at once humble, ambitious and true to KFDA’s adventurous spirit. And though such an approach seems to be driving the festival’s ever-increasing attendance rate, the co-Directors remain concerned with audience diversity. 

Their Free School initiative, which they introduced in 2019, is designed to “open up artistic practices to other forms of sharing art, other ways of passing on knowledge, and sharing experiences,” says Blanga-Gubbay. It’s program of workshops, concerts, lectures, screenings, and discussions that take place in parallel to core artistic offerings is “a way of bringing to the festival a public that is not, or not very familiar with performing arts, and a way of moving the focus of the festival towards other ways of doing things,” he adds. For their penultimate festival as co-directors, Blanga Gubbay and Douibi have decided to remain faithful to their original mantra: valuing and fostering the creation of new work : One way they’re doing that? By presenting the contemporary dance performance Friends of Forsythe at the city’s iconic Place de la Bourse, the first time it will be shown in public space. Free and open to all, it’s a symbol of what Kunstenfestivaldesarts has become: a gift from – and to – Brussels. 

Marie Baudet is a Brussels-based journalist and a specialist of the performing arts; she is a member of the editorial board of the online arts, culture and society platform La Pointe. She is involved in several juries, such as the Prix Maeterlinck for the francophone Belgian scene, and regularly contributes to the publications of Charleroi danse, Centre chorégraphique de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles. She has also contributed to the collective volume Danser, une histoire – 100 ans de danse en Belgique, published by Contredanse Editions.