Maarten Seghers looks for a confrontation with the artists, musicians and dancers Fritz Welch, Simon Lenski, Nicolas Field and Mohamed Toukabri, for whom he wrote an invocatory song about the noisiness of comforting.

What would hell look like today? The 500th anniversary of the death of Hieronymus Bosch, made Vasco Mendonça, Kris Verdonck and Dimitri Verhulst think. They quickly arrived at the beaches of Lampedusa: a place where while tourists were sunbathing refugees were washed up on the beach. The false paradise of the resorts and the Boschian hell on earth seamlessly flow into each other.

This brand new production directed by Ivo Van Hove is based on Leoš Janácek’s song cycle that goes by the same name. The result of Janácek’s inspired efforts is a mysterious, deeply emotional and psychological piece on identity, alienation, and an impossible love. Annelies Van Parys – one of the most acclaimed Belgian composers of our time – adds a fi tting contemporary reply.

Inspired by the hymn Say No!, more than 30 choirs and ensembles from across the world have created their own song about conscientious objection and desertion. All the contributed images and sounds form the material for a video creation, intertwined with a live performance by a huge international choir.

Syden means ‘South’ in all the Scandinavian languages. It evokes a Southern holiday destination: warm, cheap and with every amenity. The musician and composer Niko Hafkenscheid, the visual artist Hedvig Biong and the film-maker Pablo Castilla explore the mystery, authenticity and perversity of this parallel universe.