“Just over half a century after the genre’s heyday, we feel it is time to make a new spaghetti western. At a moment when violence and aggression bombard us from all sides, while at the same time every blow in fiction seems to require a trigger warning, we want to scrutinize the hypocrisy of Western policy, the new imperialism, the (growing taboo around) violence, and the new (puritanical) morality that attempts to mask the West’s glaring lack of ethics, through a theatrical spaghetti western in 2026.” (Aurelie Di Marino)

With Spaghetti Western, performers and theatre makers Aurelie Di Marino, Renée Goethijn, Femke Stallaert, Michiel Soete, Oscar Briou, Edoardo Ripani, Oxana Sankova, Atta Nasser, Nona Buhrs, Roel Faes, Paola Bartoletti, Yuni Mahieu, Giovanni Barcella, Kaat Arnaert, Tomas Pevenage, Anne-Catherine Kunz and Anthony Chang draw inspiration from the Italian film genre of the same name, the subversive counterpart to the classic American Western that reached its peak in the late 1960s.

Amid dirty plates, empty bottles, and shattered glasses, a world of cowboys, outlaws, heroes, and antiheroes unfolds. Someone’s head is smashed in, just because. Christ’s cross is blasted apart, and from its fragments a duel emerges. Beginning with a prologue steeped in violence and cliché, Spaghetti Western exposes the hypocrisy of contemporary neo-imperialist Western policies. The result is a satirical, epic-historical deconstruction of our (so called) postwar history.