Travellers from the south arriving at Zaventum are used to the sudden encounter with Belgium’s typically cooler and wetter weather, but yesterday it was the other way around; the weather in Belgium at the moment is beautiful and certainly much better than it was in Florence. We profited from the blue skies to go to the Chateau at Seneffe, where a series of eleven installations by Belgian film-maker, composer and artist Thierry De Mey has been set up in the Chateau’s beautifully restored grounds. Our favourite was ‘Prélude à la mer’, a film in triptych projected inside a Mongolian-style yurt. What it showed, to the music of Debussy (Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune), was a couple (Mark Lorimer and Cynthia Loemij) dancing a duet choreographed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. What was particularly special about it – and this is De Mey’s trade mark – was that it was filmed on the dry and sandy bed of what used to be the Aral Sea. The dance and the dancers were beautiful anyway, but the setting just made it sublime. This piece was worth the trip in itself.