Union Suspecte is a young, rebellious and challenging theatre, music and dance company known for its radical and blunt performances such as Onze Lieve Vrouw van Vlaanderen, Singhet ende Weset Vro and We People.

We represent a form of theatre that is both hard hitting and refreshing, and we seek to raise our audience’s awareness of their own ambivalent position in society by dealing them a blow with an artistic sledgehammer.

We do this by interweaving our personal stories with what is often not a very pure Flemish past and a with a keen eye for current political phenomena. The result is a colourful mix of dance, theatre and music. Union Suspecte produces a highly visual theatre that has for many years now carved out a unique, lively position on the Flemish cultural scene

The collective is unique by virtue of its bilingualism, unique in being made up of people with a wide range of cultural and religious backgrounds, unique in its drive to create, its quest for new metaphors and its presentation of a universal, political and human visual language independent of any ideology.

Union Suspecte is a theatre company that confronts and disturbs, and that grabs hold of current and upcoming ‘hot issues’. We strive to connect, unite and cut through. A theatre that dares to have an opinion and does not hide behind an aesthetic excuse.

Union Suspecte is an open collective with a core of four theatre producers (Haider Al Timimi, Zouzou Ben Chikha, Ruud Gielens and Mourade Zeguendi) who follow their own distinctive artistic trajectory.

Union Suspecte’s artistic multilingualism plays on a theatrical spectrum of dancing, visual and/or text-centred performances. This is made possible thanks to the colourful fusion of clichés in Onze Lieve Vrouw van Vlaanderen and Singhet ende Weset Vro; the quest for harmony in Utopeace and Broeders van Liefde or the confrontational frictions of We People or BVBA Borderline. This artistic multilingualism of Union Suspecte can be perceived perhaps most clearly in the Festival Suspecte, where we present shows and work-in-progress in a humorous mosaic of cocksure voices radical ideas.

Union Suspecte stands for an ideological and political theatre that uses a broad visual language; it has over a considerable time now been building up a sensational repertoire. We believe profoundly in the emancipatory role that culture can play in society. We uncover the complexity of our rapidly changing intercultural society without taking an unequivocal standpoint or offering direct answers. We don’t believe in an overarching perspective, but seek to rewrite existing – often Flemish and urban – narratives from another, challenging point of view.

This quest for a ‘new’ voice is not limited to combining various types of content, but is also evident in the cross-over of genres and disciplines. We do not approach intercultural, urban and identity-related questions as subjects; rather, we embody them.

We work with the city, not about the city.
We work with the intercultural, not about the intercultural dialogue.