The dutch theatre director Jan Ritsema (1945) makes theatre that triggers these strange moments where thinking and performing meet eachother. Ritsema directed repertoire from Shakespeare, Bernard-Marie Koltès and all the time again Heiner Müller, and he dramatised novels from James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Rainer Maria Rilke and others. Pieces made in cooperation with others, like Weak Dance Strong Questions, TodayUlysses and Pipelines, a construction have a huge success in Europe in the nineties and tens. Ritsema is not interested in the big illusion and fiction machine through which theatre often is represented, but in the live presentation of bodies on stage that think and that provoke thinking. Theatre as the place where actors and audience in their live gathering can think together. He started dancing when he was fifty. Made a solo. Was invited by Meg Stuart for several ‘Crash Landings’, worked with Boris Charmatz in his Entrainements project in Paris and in a Bocal presentation and made Weak Dance Strong Questions with Jonathan Burrows. Teaches at PARTS, the dance school of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker since it started in 1995. In 1978 Ritsema founded the International Theatre Bookshop and publishes more than 400 books. In 2006 Ritsema founded the PerformingArtsForum in France near Reims (www.pa-f.net), an alternative artists residency, run by artists. In 2010/11 Ritsema dances in Xavier le Roy’s new piece, ’Low Pieces’, created ’Ça’ in Paris, and ’Oidipous, my foot’ in Brussels, Essen and Graz.