A sleepless night. A mirror image that glances back at you. A day that slowly turns into a nightmare. A world where fiction and reality constantly blend together, and where no one is ever fully free from power, desire, or the systems that shape them …
Welcome to Nona Demey Gallagher’s universe.
Next season, Demey Gallagher brings three creations to KVS that feature different incarnations of her signature force fields: Copyriot, A Room of His Own and Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream.
What does it mean to be a human in a world characterised by power structures? Where who we are is never completely unrelated to the economic, sexual and ideological systems we live in, and where extreme opinions about these conflicts need to make way for nuance and critical consideration? Nona Demey Gallagher does not seek cookie-cutter answers, but instead elects to open up the questions and dynamics even further.
The result is a force field full of collisions and fractures: between freedom and control, individuality and systems, desire and the fear to let go. Everything you thought you knew is called into question, taking on an ominous edge. No easily digestible stories, but a constant attempt to search, confront and probe within unstable spaces where everything starts to falter. Figures and spaces function not just as characters or settings, but as the carriers of ideas.
These interventions make Demey Gallagher’s theatre a place of friction. Figures from various eras and ideologies are juxtaposed in constructed confrontations: radical feminist voices, free-thinking philosophers, media personalities, your own ‘perfect’ self. The focus is not on who they are, but on what they represent in Demey Gallagher’s wider inquiries around power, physicality and freedom.
These force fields return next season in Copyriot, A Room of His Own and Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream.
23 > 24/9/’26 @ KVS BOX
In Copyriot by Krapp (Demey Gallagher’s company with Mats Vandroogenbroeck and Timo Sterckx) the focus shifts to the doppelgänger. At the heart of the piece is the tension between the constructed self (formed in our own heads, and these days increasingly online) and a reality that refuses to fully comply with that image. A version of yourself that you attract and reject in turn. A conflict between who you want to be, and the realisation that this construct may always remain just out of reach.
8 > 9/10/’26 @ KVS BOX
In A Room of His Own, Demey Gallagher takes inspiration from Andrea Dworkin, who considers pornography a system that encourages violence against women and that should be demolished. In a nightmarish fever dream, she clashes with Hugh Hefner and the Marquis de Sade: two figures who each represent a completely different kind of sexual liberty. For Hefner, desire becomes a commercial product; for Sade, it’s a radical ideology free from moral boundaries. At the same time, friction arises between various feminist positions: between retreat and control on the one hand (as proposed by Dworkin), and a sex-positive approach of freedom on the other hand.
Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream
17 > 20/3/’27 @ KVS BOL
Based on Kathy Acker’s eponymous book, Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream deconstructs the legendary knight’s quest. Where traditionally a male hero overcomes the obstacles in his way to find meaning and recognition, this version of the epic starts with a female protagonist leaving an abortion clinic. From there, an erratic, satirical journey unfolds, where love, failure, and imagination meet. A universe full of grotesque, archetypal figures from American politics and (pop) culture, where parody and insanity constantly blur the lines between fiction and reality.
We aren’t trying to save the world. That’s up to the politicians. We are simply creating what is necessary.
Demey Gallagher sets herself apart with her capacity to bring major societal issues into surreal, estranging spaces, and with her consistent interest in the cross-section of pleasure and subjugation, freedom and restraint. She turns power from an abstract force into a physically, socially and emotionally visible and tangible property.
Absurdity and grotesque gestures render scenes simultaneously light-hearted and ominous. Humour and discomfort exist side by side, without overriding one another. A scene can be both comical and wry, and it’s exactly within this tension that Demey Gallagher’s unique voice shines.
The theatre becomes a place of uncovering: a space where the viewer can’t stay outside of the question, but is inevitably forced to take a stand.