Author, stage director, visual artist Dirk Opstaele is generally known as the founder and helmsman of Brussels based Ensemble Leporello (1985). Not only is he director, choreographer and actor in his own company and other groups in Europe, but he also writes, adapts and translates plays. He has breathed new life into several classical dramas, such as Le Cid by Corneille, Britannicus by Racine, Coriolanus by Shakespeare, The Metamorphoses by Ovid and Walden by Thoreau. Dirk Opstaele studied at Jacques Lecoq's International Theatre School in Paris at the beginning of the 1980s. From Lecoq he learned to view language as music, and body language as a supplement to and compensation for verbal communication. In his early carreer, Opstaele collaborated with the stage directors Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier, during wich he discovered the various possibilities offered by musical theatre. To Dirk Opstaele, theatre is an important and meaningful art form in which form and content, image and movement, text and score belong to one and the same form of expression. He wrote several libretti for small scale opera’s (“The Final Party”, “Galantes Scènes”, “L’Algerino in Italia”) and is the author of a large variaty of plays and comedies (“Cyberfall”, “On Holiday”, “The Revenge of Macbeth”…). As curator, choreographer, coach, teacher and, most of the time, stage director, Opstaele worked for theatrer companies, dance companies, circuses and art houses.