Platform In De Maak
PLATEAU25
Platform In De Maak lands at STUK and OPEK on March 22 and 23, 2025 with the festival PLATEAU25. Eleven up-and-coming makers will show new work.
For two days, a new generation of makers will conquer inspiring spaces at STUK and OPEK with various performances. Visitors are introduced to surprising work that is both young and in the making, but eager to show itself to an audience.
Platform In De Maak facilitates an eighteen-month creation trajectory (2023-2025) for eighteen starting makers. During this trajectory, the entire artistic operation is a collective responsibility of the up-and-coming makers who connect with each other and with the art field in a horizontal way based on the principle “ those who engage and organize, create. PLATEAU25 is part of this artist-run development process. On these days, we invite everyone to get acquainted with the new work that has emerged from the trajectory.
Immerse yourself in a generation of up-and-coming talent and discover what the future of the performing arts has in store.
Discover the festival program

The Process-Expo
Come take a look “behind the scenes” at our process expo! Behind every performance is a whole world of thoughts, obstacles, tryouts and scenes that didn't make it to the end - also known as the darlings we couldn't save.
During the expo, we want to share these worlds with you! You will get a glimpse of all the individual working processes the artists went through to arrive at the performances they share with you during PLATEAU25.

LOVE
Arthur Decock
There is no more humane act than entering into a love relationship. There is nothing more beautiful, nothing more intense, and nothing more intrinsically scary than opening one's own person to another, hoping to find "completeness" in merging with that other. One and one makes two, and two is complete. What does it mean on a fundamental level to enter into a relationship?
What makes us long all our lives for that complete merging with another person? And what does it mean when we do? In LOVE (part two of a four-part series of monologues about the fundamental human emotions), love is cast into language, in all its chaotic, raw, dirty, sticky and warm completeness.

Self Portraits
Rosslyn Wythes
Moment to moment, identities shift and change - a jumbled puzzle of dreams, desires, associations and relationships. In this moving landscape, Rosslyn attempts to capture her current self portrait – who she is at this precise moment, an elusive time that's shared with you. Commenting on her experience in words and connecting to play, humour, and joy, you are invited to dance as you get to know Rosslyn and her dancing.

Aquí
Jonathan van der Horst
In Aquí, Jonathan van der Horst takes you to the other side of the world with the assistance of a carefully brewed cup of coffee. For no matter how many clinking cups or creaking paper cups may fly over the counter of all those fancy coffeeshops every day, who really knows how all that black gold ends up in his/her/their cup again and again?
In a world where the source of everything in our lives is getting further and further away from us, Aquí is looking for connection again. For a way to be simultaneously here, yet also a little bit over there.

Porous
Pierre Bastin
Porous follows the trajectory of two figures evolving around interdependence as the principle of all life. In a society spinning ever faster and ever more aimlessly, the performers attempt to overcome the stress and anxiety of climate change by entering a state of sensitivity and awareness.
The piece develops around porosity and its relationship to an experience of civil disobedience action, looking at the place it can take in moments of violence. Porous becomes another attempt to translate current concerns and inspirations linked to the climate and biodiversity crisis. Allowing body and movement to convey images of revolt and communion, expressing anger and dismay, simplicity and complexity, unison and porosity.

Dreaming in Blue
Mimi Wascher
For Dreaming in Blue Mimi creates a shapeshifting world in which different matters (human and non-human) are seeking companionship, try to merge with each other and are robbed of their identity. With humour and abstraction, as well as the poetic and feminist ideas proposed by Maggie Nelson in Bluets, Mimi explores how the color blue can become a space to escape from codified identity and simplification, and instead make room for the complexity of our needs and desires. “But what goes on in you when you talk about colour as if it were a cure, when you have not yet stated your disease.” (M. Nelson - Bluets)

Tafelen
Anna Schlooz
Welcome to the Table. On the menu today: plantbased pancakes with on the side alternatives for care and family. Since the rise of industrialization and capitalism, the nuclear family has been considered the norm. But what are possible alternatives? In the social art project Tafelen, Anna Schlooz explores different forms of family formation and care, drawing from her experiences in youth care and queer communities. Through eating and reflecting together, you will be introduced to her research.

Het f*cking paradijs
Ondanks Alles
I’m a rib called Eve. Taken out of man.
Suddenly, there is Eve. Adam has no clue what to do with Eve. Eve has no clue what to do with Adam. What they both do know – because that’s what they were told – is that Eve is a rib, made out of Adam. Adam is man. The man. The human, even. Eve is woman. His woman. Adam is her ruler. And she must desire him.
Not easy.
Adam and Eve. Out of paradise. In paradise. Out of paradise. Everywhere at once. And nowhere.

Capricciosa
Carla Parcianello
A wrap is rolling.
Heads are rolling
deep down, down, down
Am I hallucinating?
Red was everywhere
spiraling through the purple room
There you sent me —
seven, seven little red birds up my spine.
Capricciosa is a dance hallucination with a (dead) body and many, many bloody birds as its centerpiece. We encounter the body of a (wo)man constantly attacked by a storm of birds every time (s)he tries to stand on its feet, and we witness the struggles (s)he faces to reconcile with the situation (s)he finds in.
Will she accept being haunted for life? Will she try to wake up from this day-dream?
The solo is a self-portrait and a form of self-contemplation, utilising Whacking dance to explore the non-binary experience. It reflects the self as a fluid organism—constantly transforming, redefining, and evolving in response to self-judgment and the judgment of the world. It’s just a matter of perception, isn’t it?

Blur XL
Jenneke Slaets
Where does one movement end, and where does the next begin? For Blur XL, Jenneke explored how movements can seamlessly flow into one another without sudden changes. In this six-hour installation performance, which blurs the boundary between black box and white cube, dance is approached as a continuous stream of transformation.